Why Isn’t My Skincare Working Any More?
September 2026
Written by Dr Geeta Moor, MBBS MRCP FRCA MD(Res) — Medical Director, The Selborne Clinic
There is a particular moment that brings people to a consultation. You have been using good products, properly, for months. At the start something was happening. Now nothing is, and the obvious conclusion is that you need something stronger.
Sometimes that is right, and resurfacing is genuinely the answer. More often it is one of five other things, and it is worth working through them before you spend money on any of it.
1. You have not given it long enough
This is the commonest reason by a wide margin.
Skin turns over across roughly a month in a young adult, and more slowly as you get older. Anything acting on pigment production has to work through several of those cycles before the result surfaces.
Realistic timelines: a retinoid needs twelve weeks before you can judge it. Pigment needs three to six months. Texture and pore appearance, three months at minimum.
Most people abandon a product at six weeks — roughly the point at which it is starting to work and has not yet shown you anything. Then they start something new and restart the clock.
If you have changed your routine more than twice this year, you have not yet given anything a fair trial.
2. You are treating pigment without daily sun protection
If you are using anything for pigmentation and you are not wearing SPF every day, all year, you are bailing out a boat without plugging the hole.
UVA reaches you in January, through cloud, and through window glass. It doesn’t just exist in the summer.
A topical that reduces pigment production a little, against a daily stimulus that increases it, produces a stalemate — and a stalemate looks exactly like a product that has stopped working.
3. Your barrier is damaged, and you have mistaken that for a plateau
More actives is not more result.
If your skin stings when you apply things that never used to sting, if you are flushing, flaking, feeling tight, or reacting to products you have used for years, your barrier is compromised. Skin in that state does not respond well to anything, and adding something stronger makes it worse.
Strip back to a gentle cleanser, a simple moisturiser and sunscreen for two to four weeks, then reintroduce one active at a time.
This also matters if you are considering a laser. An irritated barrier is a reason to delay treatment, not to escalate to it, and it is one of the things I look for at consultation.
4. The product may not contain what you think it does
"Contains vitamin C" tells you almost nothing. Concentration, formulation, pH and stability all determine whether an ingredient does anything, and none of those appear on the front of the bottle.
Cosmetic products are also formulated to limits designed for safety in unsupervised use, which is appropriate — but it means there is a ceiling on what a product bought without advice can achieve.
Price correlates poorly with formulation quality. Be sceptical of any claim that names an ingredient without a concentration.
5. What you are treating may not be what you think it is
Not all marks are the same, and they do not respond to the same treatment.
Superficial sun-induced pigment behaves quite differently from melasma, which behaves differently again from post-inflammatory pigmentation left behind by spots or an injury. Melasma in particular is hormonally driven, chronic and relapsing — a product failing to clear it is not a product failure, it is the condition behaving as it always does.
And some marks are not pigmentation at all. If something on your face is changing in size, shape or colour, is asymmetrical, has an irregular border, bleeds or will not heal, no skincare routine is the answer and no aesthetic clinic should be your first stop. See your GP.
So which of these can a laser actually fix?
This is the useful question, and the honest answer is: two of the five.
The problem: Not enough time.
Will resurfacing help? No. You need patience, not a device.
The problem: No sun protection.
Will resurfacing help? No, and treatment will not hold without it.
The problem: Damaged barrier.
Will resurfacing help? No. This is a reason to delay treatment.
The problem: Week formulation.
Will resurfacing help? Partly. See below.
The problem: Wrong target.
Will resurfacing help? Only once you know what the target is.
Where resurfacing genuinely changes things is in the last two, and for a specific reason.
The absorption problem
The stratum corneum — the outermost layer of your skin — is an effective barrier, which is its job. It limits how much of any topically applied agent gets in. A large proportion of what you apply never reaches the depth at which it could act. That is the ceiling most people hit, and no amount of buying a better serum moves it.
This is where energy devices change the arithmetic. Imaging work using optical coherence tomography compared the cutaneous channels created by different devices and found that microneedling and radiofrequency microneedling produced no demonstrable channels at all, while a fractional non-ablative 1927nm thulium fibre laser created channels that were still closing at 24 hours.
That is a measurable window during which a topical agent reaches depths it otherwise never would. It is the principle behind laser-assisted delivery, and it is why what goes onto your skin immediately after treatment is a clinical decision.
Why 1927nm specifically
The wavelength determines the depth, and the depth determines what you can treat.
At 1927nm the target chromophore is water, and water absorption at this wavelength is high — considerably higher than at 1550nm, the older workhorse of fractional resurfacing. The energy is therefore absorbed fast and shallow, depositing in the epidermis and uppermost dermis, roughly the top 200 microns.
That is precisely where the pigment, the sun damage, the uneven tone and the rough texture live. It is the same territory your topicals have been trying to reach, treated directly and at a depth a cream cannot achieve.
The evidence sits mainly in pigmentation and photodamage: a multicentre prospective study of facial photopigmentation found moderate to marked improvement after two treatments, and instrumented studies have shown measurable changes in melanin index, elasticity and epidermal thickness. There is also a retrospective series of 100 patients using this wavelength in melasma, though melasma remains a condition of control rather than cure.
This is the 1927nm thulium laser I use, and the evidence behind it, which I have set out in full here.
What I would check first
In order:
Have you used it consistently for at least twelve weeks?
Are you wearing sunscreen every day, including in winter?
Is your skin irritated rather than unresponsive?
Do you actually know what you are treating?
If the answer to any of the first three is no then a laser will not fix it, and I will tell you that at a consultation rather than sell you a course. If the answer to the fourth is no, that is the thing to establish first, and it is what a proper assessment is for.
If you have worked through all four and the answer is still that your routine has taken you as far as it can, then resurfacing is a reasonable next step — and I would read how the wavelength works before you book anything, with me or with anybody else.
Consultations at The Selborne Clinic, Hampshire.
Assessment includes a Fitzpatrick assessment, standardised photography and a discussion.
References
Wang JV, Mehrabi JN, Zachary CB, Geronemus RG. Evaluation of device-based cutaneous channels using optical coherence tomography: impact for topical drug delivery. Dermatol Surg. 2022;48(1):120–125.
Nonablative 1927nm fractional resurfacing for the treatment of facial photopigmentation. J Drugs Dermatol. 2014;13(11):1317–1322.
Li X, Qin S, Shi S, et al. Prospective study of efficacy and safety of non-ablative 1927nm fractional thulium fiber laser in Asian skin photoaging. Front Surg. 2023;10:1076848.
Efficacy and safety of 1927nm fractional thulium fiber laser for the treatment of melasma: a retrospective study of 100 patients. 2019.
Li et al. Progress of clinical research on fractional laser treatment of androgenetic alopecia: a review. J Cosmet Dermatol. 2024.
