An Easy, Four-Step Skincare Routine for Beginners

Building a basic skincare routine can feel overwhelming. We’re here to help. A skincare routine for beginners should be aimed at keeping your skin clean, balanced, and healthy — all of which are attainable by following the four simple steps below. In this post, you’ll learn how and why each step is essential to proper care of your skin. Once you understand how to care for your skin, you can build a core routine tailored to your skin type like a pro, even if this is your first time buying skincare.

Beginner Skincare Step One: Cleanse

Many skincare beginners make the mistake of thinking that they don’t need to wash their face if they don’t have any makeup on. This couldn’t be farther from the truth.

As you go about your day, your skin is constantly bombarded with impurities, pollution, excess oil, bacteria, and dead skin cells. Washing your face twice daily with a gentle cleanser removes these impurities, preventing them from building up and causing breakouts, clogged pores, and irritation. 

Washing your face twice a day with a gentle cleanser not only keeps your face clean, it also clears the way for your skincare to penetrate properly. The result: healthier, clearer, hydrated skin.

Shop our Amino Aloe Gentle Cleanser and our Antioxidant Cleansing Oil

Beginner Skincare Step Two: Tone

Facial toner is an essential step in any beginner skincare routine that balances the skin’s pH, preparing it to receive moisture. 

If you’ve ever flooded a cotton round with toner and swiped it across your face, you may have noticed that it came away dirty. But let’s be clear: this is not because the toner cleaned your face. Facial toners are leave-on products meant to treat your skin, not clean it. So if your cotton round comes away dirty, we recommend double cleansing before toning to ensure your skin is truly clean. 

Shop our Squalane + BHA Pore-Minimizing Toner

Beginner Skincare Step Three: Treat

Serums are light, easily absorbed skincare products designed to penetrate, improve, and nourish the skin by using smaller molecules and concentrated active ingredients.  While all Biossance serums contain squalane to provide added hydration and help drive active ingredients deeper into the skin, serums are generally too light to provide adequate, all-day moisturization all on their own. Their key benefit is the delivery of an intense dose of active ingredients aimed at achieving your skincare goals.

This powerful dose of actives is one of the reasons why we say it’s not necessary to layer Biossance serums. 

Shop all Biossance Serums

Beginner Skincare Step Four: Moisturize

Moisturizers provide additional hydration to the uppermost layers of skin while shielding it against environmental stressors by locking in moisture.

Some people with oily skin erroneously believe that a serum is enough to adequately moisturize their skin. But while some serums do hydrate skin, they don’t moisturize. This is a key distinction, as hydrating ingredients such as ectoin flood the skin with water to prevent dehydration, while moisturizers create a seal that keeps water from evaporating from your skin and into the surrounding environment in a process known as transepidermal water loss, or TEWL.

When your skin is not properly moisturized, TEWL speeds up. Your body then tries to protect against dehydration by producing more of its natural oils. This can lead to shiny, oily, reactive skin.

Shop all Moisturizers & Oils

Note: We’d be remiss if we didn’t mention the importance of applying sunscreen every day. Photoaging accounts for 90 percent of visible changes to your skin — and that doesn’t include the added risk of skin cancer. Protect your skin daily with SPF 30 or higher.