Photo: Courtesy of Diarrha N’Diaye-Mbaye

Want more skin care? Join the Beauty Group on Facebook.

When she looks back at her skin-care routine from a decade ago, Diarrha N’Diaye-Mbaye wishes she could give her younger self two tips. First and foremost: Read the ingredient labels. “Fresh out of college, I was very about marketing and sometimes even about just the packaging versus asking, How does this product work with the rest of my routine? What is it actually doing to my skin?” N’Diaye-Mbaye, a former social-media strategist and former Glossier product developer, learned the hard way: When some brands talk about “brightening” the skin, what they really mean is “bleaching.” A label doesn’t offer every single piece of pertinent information — it doesn’t disclose the exact percentages of each ingredient in the product, for example — but it’s a good starting point to identifying certain ingredients like hydroquinone, a common skin-lightening agent that N’Diaye-Mbaye avoids.

She’s still a beauty junkie at heart, but it took a pandemic to slow everything down for N’Diaye-Mbaye to realize that she also needed to pare down her maximalist routine, which often resulted in atopic dermatitis. “When I stopped being so fussy with my skin in the morning, I was able to focus on my skin’s language, to listen to what it really needs,” she says. “Now we’re in summertime and the ACs are blasting, I’m realizing that my skin’s a bit dehydrated, so I’m really focused on hydration.”

N’Diaye-Mbaye’s “less is more” approach