It started, as these things often do, with a late-night scroll through a flawlessly curated corner of the internet. A skincare influencer, whose complexion resembled polished porcelain, beamed at me from a video titled “My Holy Grail 10-Step Routine for Glass Skin.” Each step was a ritual, each product a sacred elixir. My own reflection in the dark phone screen—pale, a bit tired, sporting a rogue stress pimple—seemed to nod in agreement. This was the answer. I would embark on a rigorous, two-week experiment. I would follow the gospel of the ten-step routine, to the letter, and see if this obsessive commitment would truly deliver the transformative results it promised.
The philosophy behind the ten-step Korean skincare method is one of layering. It’s not about piling on heavy creams, but about building hydration and treatment like a delicate, liquid lasagna. The goal is to address every conceivable need: double-cleansing to purify, toning to balance, essences to hydrate, serums to treat, and finally, oils and creams to seal. It’s a full-time job for your face, and I was applying for the position.
Week One: The Honeymoon Phase of Hope and Hesitation
The first evening was a ceremony of unwrapping. My bathroom counter, once home to a simple cleanser and moisturizer, now looked like the back shelf of a Sephora. The process began. Step one: an oil cleanser to dissolve makeup and sunscreen. It felt luxurious, a slick, silky massage that indeed whisked away the grime of the day. Step two: a water-based foaming cleanser. My skin felt… clean. Not just clean, but squeaky. A feeling I would later learn is not the holy grail, but a potential red flag for stripped moisture barriers.
Then, the parade of liquids. Step three: a pH-balancing toner applied with gentle pats. Step four: an essence, a lightweight, watery substance that supposedly preps the skin for the heavy hitters. Step five: a treatment serum, a thin, potent liquid packed with hyaluronic acid. Step six: a targeted spot treatment for that aforementioned pimple. Step seven: a sheet mask, a fifteen-minute daily commitment that left my skin feeling damp and temporarily plump. Step eight: an eye cream, dabbed delicately with my ring finger. Step nine: a face oil, which felt surprisingly greasy. And finally, step ten: a thick, occlusive night cream to lock it all in.
When I finally stood up from this thirty-minute ordeal, my face was a sticky, shiny canvas of product. It felt heavy. It smelled like a confused garden. But I went to bed filled with the righteous certainty of the newly converted.
The first few days continued in this vein. My mornings were a slightly abbreviated version, swapping the oil cleanse and mask for a quick wash and a hefty dose of sunscreen. I felt a certain pride in my discipline. There was an undeniable sensory pleasure in the process—the cool slap of the toner, the soothing weight of the cream. My skin? It felt… hydrated. Certainly, it was more hydrated than before. But was it transforming? Was it becoming “glass”? Not yet. But I was patient. Good skin, I told myself, is a marathon, not a sprint.
The Turning Point: When Ritual Becomes Chore
By the end of the first week, the novelty had worn off. The thirty-minute routine, twice a day, began to feel less like self-care and more like a Sisyphean task. My water bill was surely ticking upwards. My garbage can was filling with sheet mask packets. The cost, both temporal and financial, was becoming starkly real.
More concerningly, my skin began to send signals. That initial feeling of intense hydration had morphed into a persistent, low-grade shine. A few tiny, flesh-colored bumps, a phenomenon known as closed comedones, appeared on my forehead and cheeks—places normally clear for me. My skin, it seemed, was suffocating under the weight of its own luxury. The “glass skin” I was promised was looking more like “oily pan.” The ten-step routine, designed to be the ultimate act of skin-pampering, was starting to feel like overkill. My complexion was rebelling against the very attention I was lavishing upon it.
Week Two: Reckoning and Refinement
I pushed on into the second week, my commitment now tinged with skepticism. I started paying closer attention, not to the instructions on the bottles, but to the feedback from my face. I noticed that the serum and the essence felt great, but the heavy oil and the thick cream left a residue that my skin seemed to resent. I was performing all the steps, but were all the steps right for me?
This is the crucial, often-overlooked caveat of any universal skincare routine: it is not universal. Skin is as individual as a fingerprint. What works for an influencer in a humid climate may be a disaster for someone with a different skin type in a dry, temperate one. The ten-step method is a framework, a list of potential tools, not a strict, unchangeable recipe.
In a moment of rebellion, I skipped the oil and the night cream one evening. I cleansed, toned, used my beloved serum, and called it a night. The next morning, my skin felt… better. Lighter. The bumps seemed less angry. The shine was reduced. A revelation dawned: more is not always more. Sometimes, more is just… more.
The Verdict: Did It Deliver?
So, after two weeks and approximately 280 individual steps, did the 10-step routine deliver?
The answer is both yes and no.
It delivered an education. It taught me the importance of double-cleansing, a step I will forever keep. It introduced me to the wonder of hyaluronic acid serums, a product that genuinely improved my skin’s baseline hydration. It forced me to be consistent, to look at my skin critically every single day, and to understand the function of each product type.
But as a monolithic, non-negotiable system? It failed. It failed to account for my skin’s specific needs, which lean towards simplicity. It failed to be a sustainable practice, demanding a level of time and financial investment that borders on the absurd for daily life. The promised “glass skin” didn’t materialize; instead, I got a crash course in over-complication and a mild case of product-induced congestion.
The true deliverable of this experiment was not a perfect complexion, but a newfound skincare intelligence. I learned to listen to my skin’s language—its tightness, its shine, its reactions—over the shouted dogma of a beauty tutorial. I dismantled the ten-step monolith and built my own, personalized routine from its ruins. It’s a routine of four or five steps, max. It’s a routine that works for me.
The ultimate lesson is that there is no one-size-fits-all solution in a jar, no matter how many jars there are. The “perfect” routine isn’t the one with the most steps; it’s the one you can perform consistently, that your skin tolerates happily, and that makes you feel cared for without feeling enslaved. My two-week test didn’t give me glass skin, but it did give me something more valuable: the confidence to trust my own reflection over anyone else’s.
