The brand’s Ultime8 Sublime Beauty Cleanser ($45) is a gold standard, but today, almost every Japanese skincare brand offers its own. Oil cleansing may be a relatively new concept in the US, but it’s been around in Japan since 1967, when Shu Uemera introduced it. At the very least, removing your makeup with an emulsifying oil or balm before cleansing is a good way to ensure you don’t leave old makeup hanging out in your pores all night. Japanese skincare guru Chizu Saeki, author of The Japanese Skincare Revolution, recommends spending as much time at night cleaning your face as you do applying makeup. Moving a blob of gel cleanser around on your mug for 15 seconds does not remove the caulked mixture of silicone-laced foundation, sweat, sebum, and whatever has been drifting down from the office vent. I’ve heard many estheticians say that American women, as a whole, do not properly cleanse their faces. I expected to come back with a few good products, but I came away with a completely different way of thinking about skincare. I dove deep into Cosme, the Japanese site for ranking beauty products visited endless drugstore and beauty shops chatted up locals and experts and checked in with Yu Soga, contributing beauty editor at Vogue Japan. I spent two and a half months traipsing around the country to find out more about the depths of the Japanese obsession with beauty. Wellness is practically the national religion. Onsen, the hot spring bath, is still a common practice, and the Japanese diet is full of skin-supporting foods like oily fish, seaweed, green tea, and the newly trendy fermented rice beverage amazake. This aesthetic dedication extends into other parts of life. Start taking stock of all the products with cult status among beauty insiders - SK-II masks, Clé de Peau concealers, Shu Uemura eyelash curlers - and you might start to wonder if Japan is low-key the best beauty country in the world. Within two blocks there might be three drugstores, a claustrophobe’s nightmare with a dizzying number of beauty bottles, tubs, tonics, and packs, and just around the corner, a couple of department stores with entire floors of even more brands. Walk down the street of Tokyo or Kyoto, Osaka or Kumamoto, and the national obsession with beauty is nakedly apparent. (Well, at least outside of the archaic and bizarro preoccupation with geishas, which makes about as much sense as taking beauty cues from Marie Antoinette.) It’s time to reassess the landscape, especially keeping in mind that Japan has the highest per capita spending on skincare and cosmetics. But Japan, for the most part, has been less of a cultural beauty brand. In the imagination of the American beauty hound, France has its effortless, tousled-hair It girls and Korea has its effort ful, snail-powered, bazillion-step skincare routine.
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