About

Why this is different

Most English-language writing about Japanese skincare is written by people who have never opened the bottle. It gets recycled from press releases, from other blogs, and increasingly from whatever an AI can summarise off a product page. You can tell, because it never mentions the things you only learn by using something for a while: that a texture pills under makeup, that a pump is badly designed, that a scent is stronger than the reviews suggest, that the last third of the bottle stops dispensing, or that the formula was quietly revised and the new version behaves differently.

I do not have insider access and I am not going to pretend otherwise. I am not in Japan, I do not know anyone at these companies, and nothing arrives here free. What I do is narrower and, I think, more useful: I buy a product, use it every day for a couple of months, and then write down what actually happened. That is the whole advantage, and it is enough.

The rules I write by

• I buy everything at full price. No PR samples, no gifted products, no sponsored posts. If that ever changes, it will be labelled on the post itself, not buried in a footer.
• I use it before I write about it. Usually two months, never less than a few weeks. First impressions are the least reliable thing about skincare and they are most of what gets published online.
• I only write about things you can get. There is a lot of wonderful Japanese skincare that never leaves Japan. Writing about it would be more fun and completely useless to you, so I do not. If it is on this site, it is on iHerb or Amazon in North America.
• I describe, I do not diagnose. I will tell you what a product feels like, what it smells like, how it sits under makeup, what it costs and whether I would rebuy it. I will not tell you what it will do for your skin, treat any condition, or make claims about protection. I am not a dermatologist and neither is anyone else writing a blog.
• I say when something is not worth it. A site where every product is a winner is a catalogue.
• I date everything and update it. Japanese brands reformulate more often than Western ones and often keep the same name and nearly the same bottle. A review from four years ago may be describing something that no longer exists, including mine.

What I cannot tell you

I cannot tell you what is on the shelf in a shop in Osaka this week, what the Japanese-language reviews say, or what is about to launch. Sites that claim that kind of access mostly do not have it either. Where something is outside what I can honestly know, this site says so rather than guessing convincingly.

How the site makes money

Affiliate links, marked as such, explained in full on the disclosure page. The short version: if you buy something through a link here, I get a small commission and you pay exactly the same price. It does not change what I recommend, and I would rather lose the commission than tell you a mediocre product is good.

Getting in touch

Corrections, questions, and "you are wrong about this product" emails are all welcome at hello@skincaredaily.online. Requests to review a product in exchange for a free sample are not.