Sometimes I feel like I have two jobs. One is my day job as a writer for The Times. The other is what’s beginning to feel like a full-time career perfecting my night-time beauty routine.
At the moment, it begins with 45 minutes in a red-light sauna blanket that is meant to help inflammation and muscle recovery. While that’s going on, I also whack on an LED face mask with a blue light function, which is supposed to help to manage my acne, and a hair mask meant to strengthen my hair.
Once that’s over and I’ve showered, I spend another 15 minutes attempting to meditate while sitting in front of a red LED panel, which is supposed to help to manage wrinkles and stress. Then it’s back to the bathroom to begin the eight-step skincare routine that involves double cleansing, serums, oils, moisturisers and various face sculpting tools.
Then time for dinner, before kicking off a series of “gut health hacks”. A shot of aloe juice, a cup of peppermint tea, then a healthy amount of castor oil rubbed onto a piece of fabric strapped around my stomach.
If I’m feeling particularly jazzy, I’ll stand on the “shake plate’’ I bought for £30, which, according to online beauty influencers, is apparently “the best way” to lymphatically drain yourself. All this before taking some magnesium, putting on mouth tape and slathering on an anti-ageing hand serum. The only good thing is that by the time this whole time-consuming and expensive palaver is over, I’m so exhausted I can hardly keep my eyes open.
Only now I have another thing to add to my list: the £52 The Seamless Sculpt Face Wrap, designed by the queen of beauty rituals herself, Kim Kardashian. The newest addition to her phenomenally successful Skims line (which specialises in sculpting underwear — aka “shapewear”), it is described on the brand’s Instagram as “our first-ever face innovation, made with signature sculpting fabric and infused with collagen yarns for ultra-soft jaw support’’. A photo announcing it shows a woman wearing a skintight nude fabric hood that vaguely resembles a balaclava.
It’s not clear how long you wear this for but it is described by the company both as “easy, everyday wear” and a “must-have addition to your nightly routine”.
It may sound mad to most of you but to Gen Z women like me (I’m 29) such paraphernalia is par for the course. The “morning shed’’ trend on TikTok involves videos of influencers essentially unwrapping themselves from all the beauty accessories they’ve piled on their faces and bodies overnight, and its videos have millions of views. The whole ritual I’ve accumulated can sometimes take up to two hours.
Skims was started by Kardashian in 2019 and you can thank it for everything from compression underpants to push-up bras with “built-in raised nipple details’’. It is said to be worth nearly $4 billion.
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The brand initially became famous thanks to its celebrity owner but also because of its emphasis on a wide range of sizing, varied colour palettes and comfort. So it was only natural that its next move would involve dipping a toe into the nearly $200 billion skincare industry.
It’s an area well trodden by Kardashians — Kim’s sister Kylie Jenner started Kylie Cosmetics (now worth $1.2 billion) and even Jenner’s seven-year-old daughter, Stormi, has begun recording Get Ready with Me videos with her mother for her audience of 393 million followers.
While I haven’t tried the Skims version, which wraps under the jaw, goes around the ears and extends down the neck like a sort of fleshed-toned turtleneck, I have (of course) tried similar, cheaper contraptions bought from Amazon.
Even I, someone with a notably high tolerance for involved and probably useless beauty rituals, found this one near impossible to get on board with. Each night, I strapped on the synthetic fabric that pulled on my ears, itched my chin and ever so slightly suffocated me as it pushed my cheeks towards my eyes. I would go to bed hopeful that I would wake up looking like the goddesses on my TikTok and Instagram feeds. Every morning I would wake to find that in my fitful rest, the chin strap had been flung across the room, in a subconscious rage.
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There are elements of my evening routine that I have grown to like, such as carving out time for myself and giving myself the chance to unwind before bed. But while some of these tips and tricks improved my sleep and skin, can I see a dramatic difference in my look after all the time spent on it every night? Not particularly. Has there come a point when this routine can feel suffocating and exhausting? Definitely. Although most of us know a piece of fabric won’t keep us from ageing, it seems social media has made us all so petrified of looking our age, we would rather take the chance than risk not having tried everything we can to stave it off.
On a recent holiday, hasty packing and limited space meant that I spent a week without most of the things that are involved in my beauty routine. Surprise surprise, I found that I was actually OK at the end of it all. My skin survived just fine, and I was getting more sleep because I wasn’t having to waste hours primping. I’m starting to think I’d rather risk a few extra wrinkles than suffer through it all for the next few decades while I wait to find out if any of this stuff works.
