A plan is only as good as what it is built from. People often expect a consultation to be a conversation about products — in practice most of the work is working out what your skin actually is before anything gets recommended, and that depends almost entirely on the quality of what you send.
The photographs
These do most of the work, and the difference between useful and useless is lighting rather than camera quality.
- Daylight, facing a window. No overhead lights, no lamps, no flash — flash flattens texture, which is exactly what needs to be seen.
- Bare skin. No makeup, no filters, nothing applied for at least a few hours.
- Five angles: straight on, both sides in profile, one tilted slightly down to show the forehead, one with light raking across from the side.
- One close-up of whatever bothers you most.
The raking-light photograph is the one people skip and the one that matters most: it shows texture, scarring and congestion that disappear entirely in flat light.
What is on your shelf right now
Photograph the ingredient lists, not the front of the boxes. Everything you currently use, including the ones you are not sure about and the one you suspect caused a problem.
This matters for a practical reason: a good plan usually keeps half of what you already own. Being told to replace everything is a sign that nobody looked.
The questions worth answering properly
- What bothers you most, and what would make you call this a success?
- When did your skin change, and what else changed around that time?
- What have you already tried, for how long, and what happened?
- Has anything ever stung, burned or caused a reaction?
- Any medication, pregnancy, or treatment from a doctor?
- Realistically, how many minutes a day will you give this?
That last one changes the plan more than anything else. A plan built for ten minutes, given to someone who has three, fails — and it fails in a way that looks like the plan was wrong rather than mismatched.
What comes back
A written morning and evening routine with specific products and specific amounts, in what order, on which days. What to stop and why. What to expect week by week, including the weeks where it looks worse. And which of your existing products to keep.
What it is not: a diagnosis. If something in your photographs needs a doctor, I will say so and say why — that part is not mine to treat, and knowing where the line is runs through everything here.