Your Skincare Routine Has 10 Steps. Cold Cream Did More

Picture a vanity at the end of the day. A round mirror, slightly clouded at the edges. A hairbrush, a lipstick worn down to a slant, and at the center of it all, one white jar. She unscrews the lid, takes two fingers of cream, and draws it across her face in slow, unhurried circles, and the entire day comes away on a square of tissue. The powder, the rouge, the red mouth she wore for everyone else then she turns off the light now picture your bathroom the oil cleanser then the foaming cleanser the toner the essence the serum and the second serum 10 steps sometimes 12 arranged along a shelf like an argument you are still trying to win and yet here's the strange part the very first step of that routine the oil you massage into your dry skin to dissolve the day is not new at all it does the same job the woman at the vanity was already doing with one jar every single night. So what happened? How did a single ritual of ending become 10 steps of becoming? Why does a culture with more skincare than any generation before it seem more anxious about its skin than ever? And what if the thing we lost was never the product at all but the permission to stop? In this video essay we're tracing cold cream from a pharmacist's bottle in upstate New York through the queens and actresses who lent it their names to the 10-step routine and the celebrity skincare shelf and uncovering what the one jar understood about beauty that our shelves have quietly forgotten. And hello everyone, my name is Laura and welcome back to my channel. If you're new here, this is a channel about beauty, Hollywood, and what we lost. Essays that use the past as a set of receipts against the present. Chapter one, the pharmacist bottle. The idea of a cold cream is ancient. Its invention is usually credited to Galen, the second century physician whose recipe combined rose water beeswax and oil and whose formula passed through centuries of apothecaries but the jar that ended up on the 20th century vanity has a much more American origin story and it begins with a remedy for cuts in 1846 a pharmacist named Theron T. Pond extracted a healing tonic from the bark of witch hazel he called it golden treasure and he sold it as a patent medicine the kind of all-purpose cure that promised to soothe wounds and a long list of other ailments. Pond died in 1852, only a few years after forming a company around it, and the product that carried on without him became known simply as Pond's Extract. Notice where this story starts. Not with glamour, not with youth, not with the face at all, but with healing. The earliest ancestor of the modern skincare empire was a bottle you reach for when something hurt. It was meant to fix a problem and then to be put away. For decades that was the whole business. Pond's began advertising nationally in 1886, and for more than 20 years after it, it advertised essentially one thing, the extract. But witch hazel was becoming cheaper and more widely available, and it was becoming clear that a remedy anyone could buy elsewhere had no real future. So the company did what companies do. It looked for a new problem to solve. It found two. In the early 1900s, Pond's introduced a vanishing cream and a cold cream. And in 1914, its advertising agency J. Walter Thompson launched a campaign that set them side by side under a single line every normal skin needs these two creams the cold cream was there to cleanse, the vanishing cream was there to protect, one to take the day off and one to face it, and here's the part I find quietly extraordinary that was with a routine two steps every normal skin according to one of the most successful skincare campaigns of its era needed exactly two things, and the advertising said so with total confidence. Within two years, sales of both creams had risen sharply, and the campaign's theme ran for eight years without changing. So why did Two Steps feel like enough? Why did a brand that wanted to sell more products choose to tell women their needs were finite? And what would happen to that confidence once the market decided that finite was no longer profitable? Because Two step routine is a promise of sufficiency, it tells you that your skin is normal that its needs are known and that once they have been met you are done, there's no third cream waiting in the wings no serum you haven't tried yet no version of your face that is still in progress, that promise would not survive the century but for a while it was the most pervasive thing a beauty brand could say and there's one more detail from 1914 worth holding on to because it tells us exactly where the story is headed. The same year, Ponds began using testimonials and the first faces it chose to vouch for its vanishing cream were actresses. The jar had found its way to the stage. It would not be long before it found its way to royalty. Chapter 2. The Queens in the Jar. By the early 1920s, Ponds had a problem that no one would expect from a market leader. Sales were slowing and not because the creams had stopped working. The agency's own research, written up in an account history in 1926 reached a remarkable conclusion. The creams, it said, had begun to suffer from their very leadership. Listen to the rest of that diagnosis carefully because it may be the most honest thing the beauty industry has ever written about itself. Because the creams are reasonably priced and used by everyone, many women have begun to believe that they couldn't be as good as expensive or imported creams. In the agency's words, their enormous popularity had brought them lost a cast, they lacked exclusiveness and social prestige. Sit with that for a moment. The product was good, it was affordable, and it was trusted. And that was precisely the problem. The cream hadn't failed. Its ordinariness had. So in 1924, the agency launched a new campaign built on borrowed glamour. It gathered endorsements from, as its own records put it, three of the reigning queens of Europe, six princesses, titled ladies, and leaders of American society. Queen Marie of Romania wrote the company asking for more of its creams, and her letter became advertising too. The ads ran in the biggest women's magazines, in motion picture magazines, and in exactly one luxury title, Vogue. And sales rose again. So was it ever really about the cream? Or had the jar always been selling something else, an association, a bored proximity to a woman the reader would never meet? And if a queen's name could restore a product prestige in 1924. What exactly is a celebrity's name doing on a bottle today? This is the uncomfortable receipt in the middle of the story, and I don't want to skip past it. The past was not innocent. The celebrity endorsement, the aspirational face, the idea that a product is worth more because someone important touched it, all of that was already fully formed a century ago, and it was built around this very jar. And modern beauty marketing didn't invent the borrowed halo. It inherited it. But there's a difference, and it's the difference the whole essay turns on. The queen's sold prestige. They do not sell more steps. A woman who bought Ponds because a princess used it still went home with two creams and a ritual that ended when the light went out. The marketing climbed, but the routine stayed the same. The glamour lived on the page. The ritual stayed at the vanity, private, finite, and finished every night. Old advertising sold you a better jar. Modern advertising sells you a longer shelf. And I'd love to know in the comments below, does anyone in your family still keep one of these jars on their vanity? A mother, a grandmother, an aunt who had used the same cream for decades and never once thought about switching because i suspect everyone knows someone that who still uses Ponds and i think she understands something the rest of us are still learning chapter three the dressing room to understand what the ritual actually meant it helps to look at the women who performed it most often and most publicly the woman at the stage in the screen early film and theater makeup was heavy by necessity built to survive hot light and to read from the back row or through the lens of a camera and at the end of the day cold cream was the classic way it came off. Picture the dressing room after a long shoot, the lights around the mirror, the wig on its stand, the costume on a hanger, and a woman sitting very still while the character she played all day comes away in long strokes of white cream. That image matters because it tells us what cold cream was really for. It wasn't a treatment. It wasn't a step towards a better version of yourself. It was a removal, a taking off. Cold cream was the moment the performance ended and the person returned. The stars of old Hollywood lived inside an extraordinary machine of image making. The studio shaped their names, their hair, their eyebrows, their smiles, their love lives on paper, and the angle of every photograph. So, so much of their public face did not belong to them. But the nightly ritual of taking that face off did. It was one of the few beauty acts in their lives that wasn't designed for anyone else to see. And this is the part of the ritual we've almost entirely lost. The privacy of it. The vanity was not a stage. Nobody filmed it. Nobody reviewed it. There was no audience waiting to see what you used. No comment section asking for links. No expectation that the most intimate few minutes of your day would become content. So what happens to a ritual once it's watched? Does it still belong to the woman performing it or does it start to belong to the audience? And when the moment of taking the face off becomes something you film have you really taken it all off because a ritual of ending only works if it actually ends the cream the tissue the light switch each was a small physical full stop the day was over the face had done its work whatever had been expected of it whatever had been performed could be wiped away and left on the dressing table until morning and that ritual had a rhythm that the body learned the same jar in the same place the same circles in the same direction. The same few minutes at the same hour. Repetition did what it always does. It turned a task into a habit and a habit into a kind of quiet. You didn't have to think about it. You didn't have to decide. The decision had been made years earlier and every night it's simply held. There's a kind of dignity in that and I think it's worth naming. The woman at the vanity wasn't optimizing anything. She was chasing a result she could photograph. She was simply returning her face to herself. The way you take off your shoes at the door or loosen your hair at night. The ritual didn't make her more beautiful, it made her finished. Beauty in that world was something you put on for others and took it off for yourself. The cold cream belonged to the second half. Chapter four, ending becomes becoming. Somewhere between that dressing room and your bathroom, the logic of the ritual flipped. Over the second half of the century, the jar slowly left the center of the vanity in 1955 Ponds merged with Chesebrough, the makers of Vaseline and its creams spread into supermarkets sitting on ordinary shelves beside ordinary things, the cold cream didn't disappear, it simply became humble a drugstore staple, a jar your grandmother used something, something people stopped talking about and while it faded into the background the skin care industry built something enormous in the space it left behind, in the 2010s, that something acquired a number. The 10-step Korean skincare routine was popularized in the West around the middle of the decade, introduced to many American readers through beauty publications like Elle and Into The Gloss. In its best-known form, it ran like this. An oil cleanser, a water-based cleanser, an exfoliator, and a toner, an essence, a treatment, a sheet mask, an eye cream, a moisturizer, and a sunscreen. Now look at the very first step. An oil cleanser massaged into the dry skin to dissolve makeup and the residue of the day strip away the packaging and the vocabulary and that is the job the woman at the vanity was doing with her one jar of cold cream, the first step of the modern routine is in its function, the entire ritual of the old one and then nine more steps follow it, I want to be careful here because this isn't a criticism of Korean skincare or of anyone who loves a long routine, some critics have argued that the 10-step routine as the West came to know it was always more of a marketing frame than a fixed tradition. Whatever its origins, what matters for this essay is what the West did with the number. It turned a routine into a standard, and a standard into a shopping list. Notice what changed. The old ritual had an ending built into it. The new routine has a sequence, and a sequence invites addition. If 10 steps are good, perhaps 11 are better. If one serum works, perhaps two will work twice as well. Every step becomes a slot that can be filled, upgraded or replaced the moment a new ingredient starts trending. So when did skincare stop being something you finished and start being something you were always in the middle of? Why does a longer routine feel more responsible even when no one can quite say what each step is doing? And if the first step already took the day off, what exactly are the other nine trying to put on? Because the answer I think is not a product, it's a feeling. The two-step routine of 1914 promised that your needs were known and could be met. The modern routine promises the opposite. It suggests that your skin is never quite done, that there's always one more problem to anticipate and one more step to prevent it. The face becomes a project rather than a presence, something that exists in draft form, perpetually unfinished, always waiting for the next edit. The ritual of ending had become a routine of becoming, and a routine of becoming is the most profitable thing a beauty industry can sell because becoming never ends. Chapter five: The Celebrity Shelf which brings us back to the queens because if Ponds once borrowed royalties or lend a jar some prestige. The modern beauty industry no longer borrows its celebrities, it turns them into the brand. In May 2019, Kylie Jenner launched Kylie Skin before the line had even gone on sale, one product in particular drew a wave of criticism a walnut face scrub which skincare professionals and fans warned would be too abrasive and cause micro tears in the skin. The backlash was loud, it was immediate and it played out entirely in public in comment sections and across social media over a product that most people had only ever seen through a phone set that next to a woman at a vanity her cream was meant to be gentle enough to use every single night for decades so unremarkable that it barely needed discussing the modern celebrity launches a debate before it is a product, it arrives already argued over already reviewed and already content. Three years later in 2022, Hailey Bieber launched Rhode with just three products, all priced under 30 and the line reportedly sold out within days. Then in May 2025, e.l.f. Beauty announced it would acquire Rhode in a deal worth one billion dollars with Bieber staying on with the brand. Now three products is a modest beginning, and in fairness that restraint was part of the appeal but look at what the restraint was attached to. Not a ritual, not a private act at the end of the day but a face that millions of people were already watching, a routine already filmed, a celebrity whose skin had become a kind of public reference point. The products were few, the visibility was total and this is where the modern celebrity shelf quietly reverses everything the old jar stood for. Ponds used a queen's name to sell an ordinary product to an ordinary woman and then left them alone at the vanity. The celebrity skincare brand sells a vanity itself. It sells a morning routine, the night routine, the get ready with me, the shelfie, the camera angle and the light. The product is the entry fee. What's really being sold is access to someone else's ritual. So can a ritual still be private when it was designed to be watched? Can a routine ever feel finished when the woman who sells it is expected to update it every season? And when you copy a celebrity skincare routine step by step, whose face are you actually trying to come home to at night? None of this is criticism of these women. Kylie Jenner and Hailey Bieber are entrepreneurs working inside an economy that rewards exactly this. And many people genuinely love what they've made. The critique isn't of them. It's of the structure. A celebrity skincare brand can't sell you the permission to stop because a brand that tells you you're finished has nothing left to launch. And so the routine has to keep moving because the brand has to keep moving. New formulas, new additions, new launches, and each one a reason to look at yourself again and wonder whether it's complete. The two creams in 1914 told you that every normal skin needed two things. The celebrity shelf never tells you what your skin needs. It only tells you what's next. Old Hollywood took its face off in private and kept its mystery. Modern celebrity pulls this routine on in public and sells it back to you the queens lend their name to a jar today's stars lend their faces to a routine that never ends chapter six the permission to stop so what did we actually lose we didn't lose cold cream you can still buy it often in jars that looks remarkably like the one your grandmother kept usually for less than the price of a single serum what we lost was the shape around it a ritual with a beginning and an end a beauty act performed in private for no one a routine small enough to be finished and modest enough that it never needed to be discussed and we lost something harder to name which is the permission to stop the woman at the vanity was allowed to decide that her face had done enough for one day she could wipe away everything she'd worn for everyone else and leave it on a square of tissue that act said something no 10-step routine will ever say to you it said you are finished there's nothing more to fix tonight think about what that permission does over a lifetime. A woman who ends her beauty ritual every night is a woman who wakes up without a deficit. She doesn't begin the morning behind, already owning her face a list of corrections. She begins it whole. And maybe that's a part of why the women of that era are remembered as composed rather than anxious, even under some of the most punishing beauty standards in the history of film. Their standards were brutal, but their rituals at least allow them to set the standard down at night. So is it really self-care if it never ends? Is it really a ritual if it has to be filmed to count? And what would it feel like to stand in front of your mirror tonight and decide quietly that your skin already has had enough? Being rooted in a ritual is being rooted in rest. Being rooted in rest was being rooted in privacy. And being rooted in privacy was being rooted in selfhood and the quiet sense that some part of your beauty belonged only to you and owed nothing to anyone watching. The skincare industry will tell you that more steps mean more care, that a short routine is a lazy one, that a woman with one jar simply didn't know any better. But the woman with one jar wasn't uninformed. She was finished. And in a culture that profits from the unfinished, that may be the most radical thing the old vanity ever knew. The ritual ended the day, the routine never ends. And maybe the most beautiful thing the jar ever did was let a woman turn off the light so thank you for watching let me know in the comments below what does your skincare routine look like do you have like 10 of them do you keep it simple with just a few products i mean i decided to buy the Ponds moisturizer cream again to try at night and the Ponds cold cream to try just because they were like very affordable $7.99 and i just want to simplify things I mean I have more acne prone skin so I might have to use some sort of other exfoliants in there just because you know I might break out if I'd only use those two and I need some sort of exfoliation but let me know in the comments below do you like Ponds have you used it I mean I go through phases but it definitely works well as a moisturizer and I and the cold cream works amazing at removing heavy makeup so thanks for watching let me know if you like these vintage style essays. I've been meaning to go back to them a bit more just because I miss them. All right, thanks for watching.