u/No-Veterinarian7542

Spent two weeks adding this cleanser half the sub swears by, the gentle non-comedogenic one that rates basically a 1 on everything. My skin was doing fine, not great but stable on differin and azelaic acid.

Broke me out in closed comedones across my chin within a week, worse than my actual hormonal flares. And I have dealt with this since I was 22 so I know when something is off. But I kept going because the label said it was safe and the rating said it was safe, so clearly I was doing something wrong with how I used it.

Nope. That product is just not for my skin no matter what the checkbox says. Idk why I expected a comedogenic rating to predict how a dozen ingredients would actually behave on my face.

Now it is in the drawer with the other stuff. The one that pilled weird. The one that was too occlusive. How do people actually figure out what works before they wreck their skin for a week.

I bumped my rate on a returning client for a new project, first real increase in about two years, and I spent way too long staring at the number before I sent it, rewrote the email a few times pulling out all the justifications so it wouldn't read as defensive, then they replied within the hour with basically sure sounds good when can you start, no pushback at all, which should feel like a win but mostly just made me realize the old number was under the entire time. ngl I don't even have a real method for setting it, I pick a number that feels a little scary, feel bad about it, send it anyway, and that's the whole system. How do people actually set the next number without it just being a guess.

My routine is not even that long but my shelf keeps filling up with acne products I used for a week and then quit.

Right now I use cleanser / azelaic / adapalene / moisturizer / spf. The stuff I stopped using was mostly "gentle" or "barrier-friendly" but one pilled, one felt filmy, one broke me out, and one just sat there doing nothing.

How do you decide when something is actually helping versus when you are just keeping it around because you paid for it