I recently started creating and perfecting routines for myself, including my morning routine, hair care routine, makeup routine and nighttime routine. I am a very type A person — so having a routine is not something necessarily out of the ordinary for me. However, the routines I have been curating for myself are not time-centered or habit-based, these routines are product-based. 

I feel like I transported back to 2015 when my one and only hyper fixation was Bethany Mota’s “Winter Night Time Routine.” 14-year-old me obsessed over the “perfectness” and organization of her seemingly presented life. I bought the same Vanilla Bean Noel body soap and put white eyeshadow in the inner corner of my eyes, all attempts to be even a fraction like her. 

I was influenced by Bethany Mota before I could even understand what being influenced  meant. She was the first, and definitely not the last, influencer who told me to buy new products with this illusion that the product would give me a life like theirs, a routine like theirs. The difference between Bethany Mota and influencers today is that she wasn’t typically promoting these products for her own benefit or profit.

Nowadays, any time you see an influencer hype up a product on their social media, it is joined by a “#ad” in the caption or a personalized discount code for their audience to use. If their followers buy those products with their code, the influencer gets a cut of the sale. However, most of the time, just posting about or mentioning the product is all it takes for the influencer to get a check sent to them from a company. 

I am not at all bashing this method of marketing — honestly, I think it is pretty genius. It also has worked for me before, I have bought multiple products because an influencer I trusted was promoting it. This technique also makes sense in the digital sphere that we all live in, and it has proven to work for companies (like Glossier). However, it has its issues — specifically when it comes to finding the product best for you.

As I mentioned, I have been in a routine kick recently. I have curated a whole hair care routine, thanks to my roommates, and my next challenge is to find myself a skincare routine. As of now, I use a simple Cetaphil cleanser, some Tretinoin and follow with CeraVe Lotion. They all work fine, but after seeing videos on my Instagram of people with a six-step routine, I felt extremely novice and childish in regard to my skincare knowledge. 

So, I began my research — research being watching more Instagram videos and trying to find the commonalities between users. Once the algorithm realized I was looking into skin care products my feed became flooded with sponsored content. This became the opposite of helpful. I was being fed doses of information that would contradict each other and videos of influencers sitting down and talking about how one product is their “holy grail” and everything else is bad for your skin (#ad). 

Since my “research” clearly wasn’t working, I decided to look into the brands I knew from watching my favorite influencers like Glossier, CocoKind, The Ordinary and Curology. But, once again I was met with the same type of influencer-esque content. If I searched the brand’s Instagram account, I would be met with that brand’s sponsored content the next day of someone I vaguely recognized gushing over a cleanser they were clearly not actually using in the video. If I searched “best skin care brands”  on Google, the top search results would lead with “Sponsored” followed by the brands I have already been investigating. 

I was getting exhausted. All of these videos and ads were telling me I needed the perfect skin care products for my routine, but none of them were telling me actually how to do it. Even articles like Vogue or other blogs were not free from sponsored content for different products. It felt like it was one brand or nothing, and in order for a product to work, it needed to be at least over $20. On a college student’s budget, this was not only unattainable but much too risky to try out a product that one girl on Instagram claims “solved all her acne issues” (#ad). Would it have the same effect on me?

So, here I am. Back at square one with absolutely no progress or purchases and a bad taste in my mouth for paid content. Normally influencer-paid sponsorships never bother me, because I encounter them on a whim. I am never in search of a sponsored product or influencer marketing, so when one pops up on my feed it feels like fate — a product that I surely must need because the universe is sending me a sign to buy it. But when I encounter them when I am in search of a solid product for me, I feel like I am being tricked. The paid and sponsored content that I see of a brand starts to feel like overcompensation for a bad product rather than a good marketing strategy. 

This explains why I have not bought anything for my imagined skincare routine. I am still waiting for that “perfect” product to find its way into my life — though it may not even exist. I will always be a sucker for Instagram paid influencer content, I can’t help it sometimes. But, my perspective has certainly changed on the whole process and the effect that that type of content has on me. Once I started to pay attention to the type of products people on social media were recommending to me, I realized how much of it is paid content. Which makes you wonder — are their opinions based on the product or the profit? 

Overall, I think influencer-paid content can be very helpful in finding something that you didn’t know you needed, which is great — but that doesn’t mean it’s always perfect. It also doesn’t mean that you have to buy it if you see it. Post research and product exploration made me realize that in reality, I don’t need a new skincare product, I just liked the idea of having one because I saw everyone else with one. And when it comes to something as serious as serums with acids that I cannot pronounce that will be going on my face — I would prefer to feel 100% certain about it rather than save 20% with a code.