My girlfriend recently showed off a skincare bundle she bought that is apparently going viral on TikTok. When I asked the price, she mentioned a number that immediately made me imagine how many AWS EC2 instances I could rent for a full month.

I am not anti-skincare. A dull face is like a bad UI, it makes people not want to interact with you. But what confuses me is the logic. How can people willingly spend an O(n^2) budget to fix bugs on their face when the root cause is actually their messed up sleep schedule?

Let us dissect the skincare routine using Big O Notation, the way programmers measure algorithm efficiency.

Let us assume the time and money you spend is the resource (T), and the number of products you use is n.

There are people whose skincare routine is just facial wash and sunscreen. This is called O(1) or constant time. No matter how many pimples you have, you still do the exact same steps. The money you spend is stable every month. This is the most efficient algorithm for your wallet and your time in the morning.

Then there is the basic skincare type. Soap, toner, moisturizer, sunscreen. This falls into O(n) or linear time. The more steps you add, the more expensive it gets, but the increase is still reasonable and proportional. If you add a serum, your budget goes up one tier. Logical.

Now, the problem arises when people get brainwashed into doing the 10-step Korean skincare routine. This is no longer O(n), this is O(n^2) aka quadratic time. Why? Because product A needs product B to absorb optimally. Product C cannot be mixed with product D because the active ingredients clash. You are just creating a dependency hell on your own face.

Not to mention you have to wait 5 minutes between each layer. Your prep time which used to be 10 minutes is now an hour. You are late for work, your salary gets cut. You are taking a loss operationally and financially.

Even worse, sometimes you use an exfoliating product (AHA/BHA) that irritates your skin, then you are forced to buy a calming product (centella/ceramide) to fix the irritation. This is exactly like writing bad code, then adding a heavy library just to patch the error instead of fixing the original code. Your technical debt is piling up, bro.

My advice, you better refactor your skincare architecture.

Find out your skin type (aka your environment variables). If all you need is hydration, just use a moisturizer. Do not pretend to need some expensive rose essence if the functionality is exactly the same.

Focus on the Pareto Principle (the 80/20 rule). 80 percent of good skin results come from 20 percent of the effort: getting enough sleep, drinking water, and washing your face properly. The remaining 80 percent of effort (vitamin c serums, retinol, eye creams) only contributes to 20 percent of the results.

Stop deploying too many products on your face before fixing your basic infrastructure. Your face is a production server, do not use it as a testing ground for random products without a backup plan. If you get a severe breakout (aka server down), the recovery cost will be way more expensive than if you had just consistently used baby soap.