A 2020 Retrospective

Oh 2020. What a year, amirite?

While COVID kept us all inside, skincare became a way to do self care and explore while exploration was impossible. The Skincare Junkies Facebook group started in late February and I never expected it to even hit 3k members, let alone over 30k. It’s been an awful year for so many of us, but I’ve also never been so aware of my privilege and how blessed I am in so many ways. My skincare bin overfloweth.

(Literally. This is why when I say I’m not buying any skincare until June, I mean it. I feel it’s necessary to state that we have solar panels, one car, and generally a low carbon footprint and low water usage. And that all my products will be used before they expire.)

Skincare has given me a community when I really needed one, and has been a good-bad influence in all of the ways that I needed it to be, even if I feel like we need to change “YOLO” to “YOHOF” — You Only Have One Face.

Skincare has really turned around my relationship to my skin and my appearance. Growing up, I really didn’t have a strong notion of skincare being important — it was more about using makeup to cover up flaws. This persisted all through my 20s, when I barely washed my face, rarely moisturized but, at least, was semi-good about wearing sunscreen thanks to moisturizing day creams. But I developed dermatitis in my early 20s that persisted all throughout the rest of the decade, and made me feel horrible about my appearance and my skin. I did the classic mistake of “throw a bunch at my skin to try to fix it” without ever realizing that if I had a real skincare routine, maybe I could mostly resolve it. In my 30s I started going to an esthetician semi-regularly and she insisted “Lisa, you HAVE to wash your face. Micellar water isn’t a real cleanse” and I was still like “ehhhhh.”

Then I picked up the “Pixi Glow Tonic” and my life changed. And I’m not being trite. Not only did it start to beat back the itchy, red skin of the dermatitis, it also faded my fine lines and wrinkles. I HAD to know what made it so magical, which led me to research ingredients and get more into skincare. This led me, inevitably, to Youtube, which led me to a then-not-such-a-big-deal Hyram, which led me to his forum, which resulted in a few of us starting the Skincare Junkies group, which resulted in me writing so much content I turned it into this blog.

So I wanted to do a few things: share my absurd unopened skincare collection that I’m going into 2021 with, and share some of my skincare-related commitments going into 2021. Here are my those commitments, in no particular order:

💸 Continue being a curator of skincare, not just buying skincare for skincare’s sake but carefully researching what I buy before I buy it. After all, window shopping is half the fun of being obsessed with skincare

☕️ Be better about doing my routine. Sometimes my old habits sneak in and I skip an AM or PM (though I’m really religious about SPF application). But I want to make sure I always set aside that “me time” for doing my routine

🥰 Continue treating my routine as a treat rather than a chore. I like having a lot of steps that I can do when I’m feeling like it, but cut way back to the classic cleanser-moisturizer-spf when I’m not feeling it

📈 Keep growing Skincare Junkies. The goal isn’t to be the biggest skincare group on Facebook, but I think of healthy growth being an indicator that we’re doing something right

👩‍💻 Be better about work-skincare-life balance so I can spend more time working on things that matter, like interacting with skincare folks and creating content, and less time just falling into the hole that is FB and FB Messenger.

💡 Either create the skincare/bath subscription company I keep considering, or just acknowledge that it’s a wantrepreneur thing and never going to happen.

🥅 Stop moving the goalposts on my skin, and appreciate it for where it’s at. My skin has come SO FAR in the last year, and I don’t think I give it enough credit. It’s easy to see that there’s more to “fix” but that’s not always a healthy relationship to your body.

If you’ve made it all the way down here, I want to know your thoughts. What are your goals/intentions for 2021 and beyond? What would you like to see from this blog?