Hello, and thank you for visiting The Skincare Shelf! Here’s a snapshot of my face, with some tomato stickers for added zest. I wanted to smile, but it (kind of) made me look like a dead fish, so I decided it would be better to spare you.

If you’d like a quick backstory of the origins of this blog, please keep reading. (Surely, you’d like to know about how and why I came to create this blog).

I had skin issues from a very young age. I used to be quite allergic to a lot of things, and I was constantly getting hives as a result. Couple that with my lack of control as a child, and you’ve got limbs covered in hyperpigmentation as a result of scratching at them.

They faded presently, but back in the summer of 2013, the hives returned with a vengeance, and again, with it, some of the worst hyperpigmentation and scarring I’ve ever had. I was constantly being asked if whatever disease I had was contagious, and I felt incredibly isolated because people would avoid me. Plus, this was during my transition from middle school to high school––the bullying in that age range is unspeakable. Even my own mother avoided looking directly at my worst areas.

To combat that, I tried every product on the market, and somehow managed to fade those marks, little by little. You can barely tell now, but I will forever remember the feeling of running my hands over horrible tiny bumps and giant clusters of hyperpigmented scars that ran down half my leg and praying for a miracle. But along the way, skincare became something like a hobby for me, and I because obsessed with trying out new products. Skincare, I learned, is more than becoming beautiful.

Something about skincare is just so incredibly self-loving. I mean, you can’t sit there and rub treatment into your legs for half an hour without becoming incredibly familiar with yourself and all the little things about your body or your face that you wouldn’t have noticed.

And when a product does work, suddenly you feel good––not only beautiful, but glad that you gave your skin some love. And then you start learning how to love how you look, how to love yourself despite that giant zit on the tip of your nose that your date definitely saw.

Skincare, as weird as it sounds, is my self-love. And we all need a little more self-love, don’t we?

Anyway, I digress. One of my friends noticed just how enthusiastic about skincare I was, and she said, “Hey, why don’t you make a little archive of skincare? So that you can look in there and recommend things to us when we ask?”

So I said, “If I’m going to make an archive of the stuff I try out, why don’t I just put it online?”

Thus, here I am.

On this blog, you will find honest product reviews. You may also find other things like series posts of me trying out weird viral skin trends, or DIY mask recipes, or really, anything that screams skincare.

So, would you like to build your skincare shelf with me?