Your great-grandmother didn’t have a skincare routine. Zero steps. Zero products.
She washed her face. Maybe with soap. Maybe just with water. She put on a little cream in winter, if her skin was dry. And then she got on with her day. Without a skincare routine.
No serum. No toner. No sheet mask. No retinol. No AHA. No exfoliating scrub with microplastics. No twelve-step skincare routine.
Her skin was fine.
Seventy years without a skincare routine. The daily shower is only about 70 years old. Before the fifties, most people didn’t have an indoor shower. People bathed weekly — or less often.
In the eighteen-hundreds, well-off families bathed a couple of times a month. The poor once a year. Daily washing meant face and hands with a washbasin.
Humans lived for thousands of years with infrequent washing. No acne epidemic. No skincare industry worth 198 billion dollars. No ten-step routines.
What changed? Not the biology. The skin is the same. It’s the amount of things we do to it that has changed.
Think about what the industry added. The daily shower led to soap ads, led to body wash with SLS, led to dry skin, led to moisturizer, led to more ingredients, led to reactive skin, led to specialty products, led to even more ingredients, led to even more reactive skin.
Each decade added a layer. Each layer created a problem. Each problem created a market.
In the nineteen-twenties there was soap. In the fifties came shampoo and body wash. In the eighties came anti-aging. In the two-thousands came serum and essence. In the twenty-tens came the ten-step routine. In the twenty-twenties dermatologists started warning against all of it.
It took a hundred years to build the carousel. And now the experts are starting to say… step off.
Your skin doesn’t need a skincare routine. The stratum corneum — the outermost layer — needs two things: lipids, meaning fats, and water. The lipids keep water in. The water keeps the skin supple.
Your body produces both. Sebum from the sebaceous glands. Sweat from the sweat glands. Natural Moisturizing Factor from the breakdown of keratin cells.
The skin is a self-regulating system. It has worked for hundreds of thousands of years without intervention.
It only asks that you let it do its job. And that you stop removing what it produces.
So what do we do — and not do? RenHverdag doesn’t sell a cure. We sell an opting-out.
The opting-out of SLS. The opting-out of fragrance. The opting-out of silicone. The opting-out of preservatives. The opting-out of fourteen ingredients you can’t pronounce.
Our soap has five to six ingredients. You can read all of them. You know what they are. And you know what isn’t in it — because what isn’t there is the whole point.
We cure nothing. We promise nothing. We just refrain from making it worse.
It’s the most boring brand statement in the world. And it’s the most honest.
Spend the time on something else. My great-grandmother didn’t spend twenty minutes in front of the mirror. She spent them on something she thought mattered more.
I don’t bathe every single day. I can’t be bothered with scrub. I can’t be bothered with seven layers. I’ve tried. I gave up. My skin is on its own.
And it’s fine.
That’s not laziness. It’s trust that the body knows what it’s doing.
Thank you for reading along. All six posts. You don’t have to do anything. You don’t have to buy anything. You now know what you know.
And your grandmother would nod.
Sources:
- ScienceInsights: When Did People Start Showering? A Brief History
- Statista, 2025: Skin Care — Worldwide Market Data
- NCBI Bookshelf: Xeroderma — Stratum Corneum, TEWL, NMF
- PMC, 2024: Tallow, Rendered Animal Fat, and Its Biocompatibility With Skin: A Scoping Review
- DermNet: Dry Skin — Barrier Function and Lipids