When did skincare become all about correction?

There was a time when having “good skin” meant you washed your face and drank enough water. Now it means you own a lab. Scroll through YouTube or Instagram for five minutes and you’ll find 13-year-olds explaining acids like they’re defending a thesis. Niacinamide percentages, glycolic toners, retinol “prevention.” Prevention of what, exactly—being 20? This isn’t skincare but a full-blown aesthetic arms race. And before anyone romanticises it as “self-care,” let’s call it what it is: a relentless dissatisfaction machine.

The business of making you feel not good enough

The most disturbing part isn’t adults overdoing it, but kids starting too early. Recent reporting shows children as young as ten appearing in skincare content online, often mimicking multi-step routines meant for grown skin. Studies show social media has pushed tweens toward products that are not developmentally appropriate which trigger both physical reactions and anxiety around appearance. Kids who don’t have skin problems are being taught they do, and then they’re sold the solution.

The industry sells insecurities on a subscription model. No one will admit that skincare thrives on the idea that your current face is insufficient. Not broken enough to fix completely—just imperfect enough to keep you buying.

Women in their 20s are told they’re already “aging.” Women in their 30s are sold “prevention” like it’s a race against time. Women in their 40s and 50s are handed the word “correction,” as if their faces are errors to be fixed. Even older women—who once had a kind of cultural permission to age—are now being pulled back into the loop. Fine lines are no longer just part of living; they’re “targets.” Skin is no longer allowed to change. Across age groups, the message is the same: you could look better, and you should try. So the 13-year-old with clear skin and the 45-year-old with laugh lines are both being told their natural skin is a problem waiting to be solved.

Skincare’s fixation with “correction”: Is it healthy?

Teen skincare routines often include multiple expensive products with overlapping ingredients, increasing irritation risk while offering little actual benefit. You’re paying more to mess up your skin faster. Meanwhile, only about a quarter of those routines even included sunscreen—the one thing dermatology universally agrees on.  But sunscreen isn’t sexy, “barrier repair essence with fermented something” is.

The algorithm has rewritten what “normal” skin should look like. Social media doesn’t just show you real skin—it edits, filters, blurs, and then tells you it’s achievable. Repeated exposure to idealised faces has been shown to increase pressure to conform to unrealistic beauty standards. So now pores are a problem, texture is a problem, being human is a problem. And once you’ve been trained to notice these “flaws,” you can’t unsee them. That’s the trap.

Are you caring for your skin or controlling it?

Actual dermatological advice is almost offensively boring: cleanse, moisturise, sunscreen. That’s it for most people. But simplicity doesn’t scale as a business. Complexity, layering and confusion does. Because confusion makes you dependent—and dependency is profitable.

We’re not trying to care for our skin. We’re trying to control it. The obsession with skincare isn’t really about skin. It’s about control. Control over aging, perception, how we’re seen and judged. And when control fails (because skin is biological, not obedient), the response isn’t acceptance. It’s escalation with actives, more steps and new routines. 

So, are we comfortable in our own skin? Absolutely not. We’ve built an entire industry that monetises that discomfort. And possibly the cruelest part of all is that the more we try to “fix” our skin, the less we actually experience it as ours. We have made ourselves a project, a problem, a before-and-after waiting to happen.

We need to understand that not every pore needs a product. Not every texture needs a treatment. Not every face needs to be optimised. Because if skincare starts at 12 and dissatisfaction starts at 12, we’re not creating better skin. We’re just creating better consumers.

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