My Mother’s 5-Step Korean Beauty Routine Completely Changed My Skin

When I was 12, I walked into the kitchen to discover my mother gingerly scraping the goopy jelly from an aloe leaf she had just picked from the garden into a mason jar. She poured two cups of soju—a clear fermented-rice liquor from her native South Korea—over the top, followed by the juice and zest of a lemon. To give the ingredients time to mingle, it went into the fridge for a month, right next to her smorgasbord of homemade kimchi. When the liquid was ready, she strained it through a fine-mesh sieve until every trace of muck was gone. The secret sauce left behind: so le al (Mama Choi’s acronym for soju, lemon, and aloe), a DIY facial toner meant to brighten, tighten, and clarify her skin. She kept the concoction in a spray bottle and spritzed a mist all over her just-washed face every morning and night. Her routine was simple, cheap, and very effective, because that stunner is now in her late sixties and doesn’t look a day over 45.

A few years later, when I started dealing with breakouts, she gave me my very own bottle, along with a soap made of pungent oriental herbs and ginseng-infused lotion. I’m embarrassed to say that, initially, I snubbed it all. Korean culture, food, and certainly its beauty secrets—homespun or manufactured—weren’t cool in the nineties, and so I dismissed my mother’s alchemist abilities and skin care know-how as weird and inferior.

But when my teenage acne went next-level, I was despondent enough to think, What the hell—give me the stinky K-beauty stuff. And you know what? The ­regimen worked. I fell in love with her recommendations because they cleared up my skin (suck it, zits), but I also loved how they made me feel. The twice-daily ritual felt fancy and insanely confidence-boosting and, if I’m being honest, like a rite of passage—of both mastering good skin care governance and appreciating my cultural roots. The ancient beauty wisdom of my ancestors had been bestowed upon me, and I was hooked.

Fast-forward nearly two decades and the rest of the world has reached peak K-beauty love too. I’m happy to be its number-one cheerleader. Snail slime? OK! Sheet masks on the daily? Into it! But there’s one major thing I do have beef with: the idea that you “need” to follow an excessive 12-plus-step routine to see results. Not true! In fact, streamlining your regimen, K-beauty or other­wise, can be beneficial. Because the great paradox of the multistep, mix-and-match approach to skin care is that while you can get the perfect-for-you routine, you could also overdo it and turn your skin into a real grouch (as in current mood: red, irritated, and irrationally sensitive). I love products, and I’m all for a little self-care moment. But you don’t need a shelfie full of stuff—or a ton of time—to make good skin a reality.

To help you cut through all the K-confusion, here’s my no-B.S., tried-and-tested K-beauty course of action.