By John Koten | Photographs by Bobby Doherty for WSJ

It all began six months ago following the 20th surgery to slice skin cancer off my face. With the encouragement of my dermatologist, I resolved, at long last, to get serious about nursing my aging countenance.

Thus I set out on a journey into the sometimes baffling but also magical world of women's face care. Over time, I purchased enough toners, essences, serums and creams to fill a 2-gallon bucket. I completed 2,160 applications of 136 different elixirs.

I shunned products claiming to be "uniquely formulated" for men. These reminded me of those cutesy pink tool kits aimed at female do-it-yourselfers, offering little more than a screwdriver and a wrench. I wanted the full arsenal. L'Oréal alone has 20 skin-care brands, each with their own product lines; Estée Lauder has 14. In the skin game, shopping in the men's section is like opting for a popgun instead of a bazooka.

I was especially eager to find out whether "antiaging" products really can reverse the skin's battle with time. I happen to be proud of the hard-earned chasms jackhammered into my mug, and I see no need to camouflage my age; what I wanted was healthier skin. To ward off any backsliding, I also wanted to discover products I loved using.

My quest took me from inexpensive but good drugstore brands like L'Oreal's CeraVe and LaRoche Posay to luxury brands with obscene prices in fancy-pants containers. I set a $400 per item limit, but did score a small sample of Auteur's bewitching "Composition No. 1" serum. It costs $1,190 a bottle pre-tariffs. I had just enough to give it three shots at seduction and it proved quite lovely. But I ended up deciding I'd get more for my money if I bought a new band saw.

Hard-bitten masculinity

Skin aging (which starts around age 20) is a multifaceted, slow-motion car wreck. Assaulted by the environment, the sun and other factors, skin becomes less and less adept at producing its own hyaluronic acid, collagen, elastin and growth factors -- all of which play roles in the skin's health. Communication between cells also breaks down and causes chaos. Meanwhile, dysfunctional senescent cells, also known as zombies, multiply and release toxic missiles that cause other cells to become similarly impaired. The result: wrinkles, sagging, dryness and discoloration. Over time, even the skin's DNA gets corrupted.

How to fight back? Messing with women's face creams isn't something I was raised to do. I grew up believing a guy's visage should display hard-bitten masculinity, ideally with a scar or two. Last year, in response to a study conducted for CeraVe, 47% of the U.S. males who responded said they would rather "hand wash their laundry for a month than start a face care routine."

But this may be changing. Young men now constitute the fastest-growing segment of the face-care market, and celebrities like David Beckham, Machine Gun Kelly and Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson have launched product lines. Men also have begun responding to the increasing number of medical-grade consumer products anchored in scientific advancements.

I needed to sweep the old prejudices aside to save my own skin. But at first, I found the thousands of choices out there overwhelming. Many product names seemed inscrutable. "HA5"? What's that? "Triple Lipid Restore"? Is fat now a good thing? Ingredient lists proved equally confounding. Anyone for "glacial glycoproteins" or "punica granatum extract"? Liquid oxygen?? I thought that was for rockets.

I learned to check ingredients claims to see if the touted component was actually near the top of the label. Given that water accounts for 80% of most products, anything that's not at least 1% of a concoction might be there simply so the seller can make some sort of proclamation.

To separate the best creams from the crop, I scoured back issues of Vogue, Glamour and Allure for top picks. Dr. Marisa Garshick, my dermatologist and a member of my all-female advisory board, warned: "It's a wild west out there, John. Be careful."

Weed-whacking my way through the marketing hype, I encountered one website after another festooned with announcements like this one: "98% of users experienced improvements in firmness after two days." Yet it was rare to find any support for these boasts. There are almost no footnotes, no links to actual data, no descriptions of survey methodologies. And what is "firmness," anyway? And who is doing the measuring?

A trip to Kiehl's

A few weeks into my journey, I visited the Kiehl's flagship store. It's just down the avenue from my house in Manhattan and I love its old-time apothecary vibe. On display is an Indian-brand motorcycle once owned by Aaron Morse, an accomplished chemist and military pilot who turned a family drugstore into a successful skin-care company. The bike is strategic: It's there to make fellows like me feel welcome. (Time to dispel an urban myth: The squalene used in Kiehl's products comes from olives, not shark livers.)

One of the Kiehl's technicians offered a free skin analysis. Clad in a laboratory coat, he led me nose first into a device that measures things like wrinkles, skin texture and pore sizes. No surprise: My skin was judged to be limp, plastered with blotches, and pepper-sprayed with sun damage. C-minus at best.

I had great luck with virtually everything sold by Kiehl's, which is now a L'Oréal Group brand. But I did blunder a few times in my selections elsewhere. I ended up mailing a $200 bottle of Sisley Paris's Ecologic Compound to my sister because it made me smell like my grandmother. I had a similar experience with the renowned La Mer. I was attracted because I'm a sailor, because I was curious about its algae-based "miracle broth" and because I could borrow some from my wife. But it felt heavy on my face and made me smell like my other grandmother.

The way I scrubbed my facade (normally a vigorous frenzy of hand soap and bubbles) also needed revamping. Cleansers should have a medium pH and be gentle so as not to upset or abrade the uppermost layer of skin. This membrane is composed of flattened dead cells that slough off at the rate of thousands per minute. The cells, in turn, are held together by fats. This skinny veneer is called "the moisture barrier." Like the covering on a grape, but smarter, it defends against environmental assaults and too much evaporation.

According to Kiehl's, as much as 80% of the cleansers sold can damage this all-important face shield. Once mangled by a harsh soap or exfoliant, it can take many days to recover.

With coaching from Sarah Karaolides, another member of my support group and a two-time winner of Allure's top celebrity aesthetician award, I learned to be more zen-like in my cleansing routine. Vanicream was the soapless cleanser I selected after learning that it is the preferred choice in clinical trials (because it doesn't pollute the product being tested). It costs about $14.

C in the morning

I tried to steer clear of industry hysteria and stick with the basics. Garshick advised me that a topical vitamin-C serum is a must in the morning. It's a powerful nutrient and protective antioxidant. Of the three most commonly used types, L-ascorbic acid is the most potent but also the most unstable. Many brands combine it with or substitute other forms of C. Adding vitamin E and ferulic acid to the mix helps maximize effectiveness.

The Irish portion of my skin kept rebelling from the acids as I tried different C products. Finally, I donned SkinMedica's C+E serum. It proved to be my cup of C because it delivers the vitamin in a gentle time-release form. Vitamin C must be protected by sunscreen or it will quickly lose its mojo.

The best time to swab on a retinoid is in the evening. That's when the skin's repair apparatus goes into hyperdrive and the sun can't trigger a retinoid's UV amplifying effects. Tretinoin, sold by prescription and one of the strongest of the retinoid creams, was first deployed in skin care in 1943. For all of the billions of dollars spent by the industry on R&D since then, scientists worldwide have yet to find another ingredient that surpasses a retinoid in efficacy. In a survey published just last month in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology, cosmetic dermatologists gave retinoids a 96.8% approval rating, topping a list of 318 skin care ingredients.

Nearly everything Tretinoin does is good for the skin, though it doesn't hydrate. Some people have a hard time tolerating even weaker-strength retinoids sold over the counter, but there's a natural, more-gentle alternative called Bakuchiol that is nearly as effective and has anti-inflammatory properties. I sometimes use both in combination.

During the dry winter months, I learned to use hyaluronic acid serums to keep my skin moist. This is a humectant that traps up to 1,000 times its weight in water. A bottle from the Ordinary (an Estée Lauder brand) costs $10. My favorite humectant, though, turned out to be Auteur's Definitive Hyaluron Activator serum, which costs 31 times more. Like all high-end products, it emphatically doesn't perform 31 times better than its lower-cost rivals. But it does contain five different molecular weights of hyaluronic acid to reach different layers of the skin. (Hey, HA5, now I get it.)

I need to mention another humectant lest the TikTok mobs hunt me down. It's Corsx Snail Mucin, a South Korean marvel that is exactly what it says it is. Hard as it may be to believe, I actually enjoyed smearing snail slime trails on my face. Only a manly man would be brave enough to do this, right? (Except, of course, the millions of young people on TikTok whose brains haven't fully formed.)

What brown spots?

I spent six weeks experimenting with a 10-step Korean routine that's also popular among the FaceTime set. The South Korean government supports skin-care research as a source of national pride and I found that products from brands like Corsx, Innisfree and Dominus all had stellar formulations and were reasonably priced. The niacinamide in Dominus cream wiped out so many of my brown age spots that I no longer recognize the backs of my hands.

Korean skin care has become such a big deal that L'Oréal, Estée Lauder and Groupe L'Occitane all now own a South Korean skin-care brand.

Many new discoveries will likely come from bioengineering peptides to convey precise messages to the nano-thin command post that envelops every cell. I visited a lab in Brooklyn that has been using a novel peptide to communicate with cells to regenerate human organs. It now churns out the primary ingredient for a brand called Sweet Chemistry. It sells for $170 a bottle. Another is One Skin, a product with a peptide named OS-01 that its creators say can zap toxic senescent cells.

Then there's Plated, which my sister's facialist calls "crazy badass." Its maker, Rion Aesthetics, obtained its star ingredients from the Mayo Clinic after scientists and technicians noticed improvements in their skin after handling extracts from blood platelets -- the tiny EMTs that arrive the moment skin bleeds.

Sweet Chemistry, Plated and OneSkin offered what I found was the best documentation for the science behind their products. Another was SkinMedica. Its TNS Serum is the one I now smear on most. It contains growth factors synthesized from human tissue that have been cultured in a lab. Growth factors are naturally occurring proteins that, among other things, stimulate collagen and elastin production. They are widely used by doctors in wound healing.

Not counting all-important sunscreen applications, moisturizers are the final step in a routine. I enjoyed these luscious concoctions so much I ended up trying more than 30 kinds. I actually tingled the first time I tried one from Laboratories Filorga out of Paris. It was pink, smooth and gauzy soft, with a delicate whisper of an aroma. I liked a moisturizer from Environ, a South Africa company with a focus on vitamin A. It comes in capsules you squeeze like a pimple for each dose. A new brand launched this year by Sisley Paris is called Neure. I found its texture nothing if not sensual. Its selling point, though, is the 10 years of research Sisley says it did to evaluate the impact of various cosmetic ingredients on mood. I use the version called Serenitie. It's chill.

Skin-care companies focus much of their attention on the feel of their products in hopes of pleasing the 1,000 nerve endings found in each square inch of skin. And, for me, when it came to feel, there was no topping Rich Cream, made by Augustinus Bader, a London-based skin-care company named after a German scientist who is prominent in the field of wound repair. I tried moisturizers from France, South Africa, Spain, Japan, Iceland, Korea, Australia, Germany and the U.S. Not one left my face feeling as natural and fresh as this one. It quickly absorbed and never intruded during the day. Along with seemingly every Hollywood celebrity, I now apply Rich Cream every day, even though it costs $305 a bottle.

My better mood

The thing that surprised me most was the positive impact regular face care started having on my mood. I learned that a routine to begin and end the day can be a powerful meditative transition. Modern science now confirms what most women have known since Cleopatra bathed in milk: Happy skin sends happy messages to the brain via the senses.

So how is my skin doing after six months of renovation? It took weeks before I could detect whether anything at all was happening beyond covering myself in goop. Three months in, though, people were asking where my old face had gone. I now shake my head in wonderment when I look in the mirror. It's hard to believe the smooth, moistened, even-toned, and more-elastic sheathing that looks back at me. I don't know if my skin is biologically younger, but it certainly looks it. I had learned that all skin care is "antiaging."

The other day, I got another skin analysis at Kiehl's. This time there was no need for alarm bells. I had squeaked into B-plus territory, but this technician gave me extra credit for being a geezer and awarded me an A.

John Koten is a writer in New York. He can be reached at reports@wsj.com.

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Dominas, a skin-care cream brand from South Korea, was misspelled twice as Dominus in "A 70-Year-Old Man's Search for Younger-Looking Skin," at 2:02 a.m. on May 22.

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May 23, 2025 16:07 ET (20:07 GMT)

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