Your face is a cake.

Recommended reading: NYT - All of those products are making your skin worse

First off, I'm obsessed with cake. So I loved how New York dermatologist, Dr. Shari Marchbein, explains why you need to moisturize within a minute of cleansing.

"If you frost a dry cake, the cake is still dry. If you frost a moist cake, it stays moist."

I also loved how the article hit home these key points:

- Your skin is a sacred microbiome of bacteria.

- Shitty formulations lead to shitty skin.*

- pH balance is important.

- More is not more. Stop attacking your face with too many products.

- Foamy lather is a myth.**

Man, I can keep going with the face cake metaphor. Makeup are the sprinkles and toppings. In general, you don't want to use sprinkles that are pretty but, are going to ruin the eating of the cake. Put good ingredients into your face cake.

Take care of your face cakes y'all.

-kl

* Companies that obviously don't have your interests at heart, aren't selling good products, just cheap products with terrible ingredients.

**This was oddly introduced to me in my first year art history tutorial via Roland Barthes' essay on detergents. Basically it's false narrative invented by CPG ad men. That foamy stuff is often sodium lauryl sulfate and it makes my skin peel off. It's super harsh, but again, not necessary for most people to avoid it. It is very bad for anyone with skin barrier issues.