For most of my late teens and twenties my skin did two things at once that are not supposed to happen together.
I broke out. Not occasionally, but consistently, along my jaw and across my forehead, the kind of thing you learn to angle away from a camera without thinking about it. And at the same time my skin was dry. Tight after every wash. Flaking across my cheeks by the afternoon. Every product aimed at one problem seemed to make the other one worse.
Anything marketed for breakouts stripped me raw. Anything marketed for dryness felt like it sat on top of my face and clogged everything. I would find something that seemed to help, use it for three weeks, and then watch the other half of my skin fall apart.
The drawer
What I ended up with was a drawer. You probably have one too.
Mine had maybe fifteen bottles in it, almost all of them a third full. Cleansers that promised clarity. A moisturizer someone at a counter talked me into. Two different serums I could not have told you the purpose of. I had spent real money, over years, on products I abandoned before finishing because I could never tell whether they were working, making things worse, or doing nothing at all.
The part that bothered me most was not the money. It was that I had no way to learn anything from it. I could not tell you what any of those products actually had in them, so when one of them broke me out I could not avoid whatever caused it next time. Every purchase was a fresh guess.
The moment I actually read a label
At some point I sat down and tried to read them properly. All of them.
It was harder than it should have been. Ingredient lists ran twenty, thirty, forty items long, in tiny type, in an order and a naming system nobody explains to you. The things a product advertised on the front of the bottle often turned up near the very bottom of the list, which is to say there was barely any of it in there. Plenty of what was in the bottle was there to give the product a texture, a scent, or a shelf life, and did nothing whatsoever for my skin.
And a lot of it I simply could not check. Labels leaned on phrases like natural blend or botanical complex or proprietary formula, which sound like information but are the opposite of it. A product would tell me what it was for and refuse to tell me what it was.
That is the thing I could not get past. I was putting these on my face twice a day, for years, and I was not allowed to know what they were.
What I decided to build
Altarus started from a fairly narrow idea: a shopper should be able to see every single ingredient in a product before they buy it, not after.
So that is the rule we hold ourselves to. Every Altarus product page publishes its complete ingredient list. Not the highlights. Not the marketing-friendly three. The full list, in full, on the page, next to the price, before you add anything to your cart. If it is in the bottle, it is on the page. Our Ingredients page gathers every formula in one place so you can read the whole range without clicking through it product by product.
The second thing I wanted to fix was the guessing. The reason my drawer filled up was that I was buying single products and hoping they would get along with each other. So we built routines instead. Each Altarus kit is three full-size products, chosen to work together, in one add to cart. A cleanser, a targeted treatment, and a moisturizer that will not fight each other.
There are four of them, and they exist because of specific problems:
- Clear + Calm is the one I would have wanted at nineteen. Niacinamide-led, built for oily, combination and breakout-prone skin, without the stripping.
- Daily Glow is for the other half of my problem. Hyaluronic acid and aloe, for skin that is dry, tight or dull.
- Night Renew is a PM-only stack with dedicated eye care, for people who would rather do the work overnight.
- Men's 3-Step Essentials covers face and body in three moves, for anyone who wants a real routine without a twelve-step shelf.
The guarantee exists for a reason
Here is the uncomfortable truth about skincare: nobody can promise you a product will work on your face. Skin is individual. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
What I can do is make being wrong cost you nothing. If an Altarus product is not right for you, tell us within 14 days and we will refund it. Opened and used, not just sealed. You do not ship anything back. That guarantee exists because I remember exactly what it felt like to have $60 sitting in a drawer as a reminder of a bad guess.
US shipping is included in the price too, so the number on the product page is the number you pay.
If your skin is doing two things at once
If you are dealing with what I dealt with, breaking out and flaking at the same time, and you are tired of buying blind, I would start by reading a label. Ours or anyone's. You should be able to find out what you are putting on your skin, and you should be able to find out before you pay for it.
That is the whole idea. Everything else we do follows from it.
Not sure which routine fits? Take the 30-second routine finder, or read every formula we make on the Ingredients page first. Either way, you will know what is in it before you decide.
Written by the founder of Altarus Beauty. Altarus products are cosmetics and are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease. If you are dealing with persistent or painful skin problems, a dermatologist is the right call.