Skin In The Game

It's Time to Give Skin a Little Love. Linda Wells— Allure's Founding Editor— Shows What's Up in the Land of Cleansers, Masks, Serums, and Hydrators, on Medel Sara Sampaio.

The first time I made any money of my own, I took it straight to the beauty counter and bought myself a lemon-scented cleanser and a skin-scrubbing brush. I was a 13-year-old babysitting machine, and I was on a mission. A few years later, I moved on to Clinique’s efficient three-step system, which in my mind is skin care’s gateway drug. 1 From there, it was Erno Laszlo black sea-mud soap and Mario Badescu facials, upping the ante with each new treatment and each new paycheck.

Hello, my name is Linda, and I am a skin-care addict.

While makeup is getting all the millennial love in beauty today—with contouring creams, highlighting compacts, eye-shadow palettes, and lip kits selling like mad—I’m here on the other side of the divide to celebrate skin care. Remember skin care? It is the basis of all things right in beauty. My affection for it is proof alone that I’m not a millennial—and let’s please not discuss my birth certificate. I could actually document my life by skin-care milestones: I know exactly where I was when I learned that Retin-A was approved by the FDA. I remember seeing my first wrinkle in the rearview mirror of a cab 2 and feeling the prick of my first shot of Botox in a dermatologist’s office in Paris. I don’t just like skin care; I love skin care.