Most skincare is redundant

That's how the industry likes it.

The average skincare routine is addressing the same concern multiple times. Not because your skin requires that level of attention. It’s because the industry is structured to sell you as much as it can, as often as it can. 

We all know this on some level but it feels like a problem too big to tackle. There’s so much misinformation out there that it’s hard to understand what your skin even needs. This lack of clarity can keep you spending on skincare while feeling like there’s still something missing.  

The same logic that drives most consumer industries also built the modern skincare routine: more products equal more revenue. Cleanser, toner, serum, moisturizer, eye cream, spot treatments, weekly treatments, bi-weekly treatments that should never meet each other. It’s a never-ending story of consumption driven by everything but consumer needs. 

What’s rarely discussed is how much overlap there is in the average multi-step skincare routine. Skincare brands sell products based on a single ‘area of concern’ or a ‘hero ingredient’ while most products are formulated using multiple ingredients that provide a cumulative effect to deliver on the product promise. Many of those ‘other’ ingredients appear across multiple commonly used products in the same routine. Once you learn that much of product differentiation is marketing, and not your well-being you can free yourself from one of Big Beauty’s greatest traps. 

Artificial segmentation is a quiet but insidious part of the beauty industry’s anti-consumer practices. When a brand releases an eye cream alongside a face moisturizer, they're often working with near-identical actives and delivery systems. The eye cream exists because the category exists and because it commands a premium. A tiny jar with the same active ingredients as the big jar, with slightly different concentrations. The same logic applies to the proliferation of serums. Each one is positioned as essential. Each one narrows its claimed benefit enough to justify sitting alongside the three others already in your cabinet.

Inflating the number of steps in your routine is a compounding factor. Remember when skincare was 3 steps? What if we told you that magic number was made up for marketing purposes too? An externally defined number of skincare steps is the perfect way to box consumers into a feeling of necessity. You don’t want your routine to be incomplete, do you? Fear-mongering is inherent to most beauty marketing. Not only that you’ll age (god forbid), but that you’ll be left behind in some way if you don’t keep up in a world where ‘keeping up’ is defined as always buying the latest. The extra benefit to the industry is that while you’re focused on keeping up, you’re distracted from the fact that those “holy grail” products they promised would change your life actually didn’t change anything except your bank balance.  

We formulate MILO Multifunctional products to work as a system rather than a sequence of isolated steps. Multifunctional formulation means one product is doing the work of several.  Not by cutting corners, but by designing with that intention from the start. This requires more from the formulation process. It's considerably harder to build something that delivers across multiple functions without compromising any of them than it is to build a single-benefit product that sits alongside many others. Individual brands and products benefit from plausible deniability in a multi-brand routine. “Maybe it was the other guy” has always been a strong legal defense. 

The end result is a routine with less redundancy, fewer steps, and fewer products occupying brain and shelf space. The MILO Trio is designed to complement each other rather than address the same concern from slightly different angles. They work better together than a collection of unrelated singles from different brands ever could.

A shorter routine done consistently will always outperform a long one that’s ever-changing. On top of that, a lot of of how your skin looks has nothing to do with what you put on it and everything to do with how you care for your body overall. Adequate sleep, hydration, and nutrition are the real MVPs of skincare because your body replenishes itself through its own systems when you give it the right inputs. These things might not offer the same dopamine hit as clicking add to cart, but they are what your body needs and deserves.

By allowing yourself to reconsider what’s necessary and what’s marketing, you are opening up a world of possibility beyond the cycle of consumption the beauty industry wants to live in. If you’re curious about the science behind MILO Multifunctional, you can read about it here.