Keke Palmer’s top skincare tip isn’t a product, it’s a dermatologist, and the professionals agree: seeing an expert first prevents the misuse of prescription retinoids that DIY routines keep causing.
Keke Palmer has been famous since she was eleven, which means she has spent more than two decades having her face studied, lit, made up, and photographed. She has also watched the skincare industry balloon from a shelf of drugstore basics into a trillion-dollar theater of serums, devices, and ten-step routines. When Who What Wear asked her for her actual advice, she did not name a viral product or a clever hack. She named a professional. “A dermatologist is number one,” she said. “Sometimes, you might need a topical medication. You might need an oral medication, so I would say don’t be afraid to take that step and help yourself.”
It is a safe thing to say and a slightly radical one at the same time, because it inverts the order most people follow. The modern instinct is to exhaust the internet first, to try the acids and the patches and the influencer’s routine, and to treat the dermatologist as the expensive court of last resort after everything else has failed or made things worse. Palmer, who has the resources to buy any product on earth, is recommending the opposite sequence. See the expert, get the prescription if you need it, and skip the months of self-directed experimentation on the most visible surface of your body.
The professionals have been making this argument against a strong cultural current. The prescription retinoid tretinoin, the gold standard for both acne and the hyperpigmentation Palmer is careful to mention, has become a social-media obsession, with tens of thousands of TikTok posts, and its virality has produced exactly the misuse dermatologists feared. “It’s a prescription because of the strength and the need for someone with more expertise to guide you in using it,” the New York dermatologist Michelle Henry told Refinery29. The correct method is counterintuitive and easy to get wrong: “You put moisturizer on first, then your medicine, then more moisturizer,” Henry explained, and you begin slowly, “every other night, maybe twice a week, then slowly increase as you tolerate.” The version circulating online, in which people slather it on like a night cream, she called, through the publication, wrong and dangerous.
The stakes are higher for exactly the people most likely to be searching for a hyperpigmentation fix. The dermatologist Nkem Ugonabo told Essence that “retinoids are probably the number one skincare product I see being misused. It’s easy to use too much.” She starts patients low, often at 0.025 percent, and raises the strength only months later if the skin tolerates it, because on deeper skin tones the irritation from moving too fast can itself trigger the dark marks the person was trying to erase. This is what dermatologist exists to prevent, and it is invisible to a routine assembled from strangers’ videos. The British Skin Foundation spokesperson Adil Sheraz, also speaking to Refinery29, put the risk of unsupervised use plainly: tretinoin “can result in significant irritation, redness, peeling and inflammation in certain individuals.”
The case for the boring, expensive first step
Palmer’s philosophy does not stop at the derm’s door, and this is what keeps it from sounding like an advertisement for co-pays. She fills in the everyday layer with sensible, widely available choices: a La Roche-Posay cleanser and retinol, star-shaped pimple patches “that come in the green box,” a freckle pen she bought off Instagram. She is not against the fun of beauty. She is against skipping the diagnosis. The distinction she draws is between decoration and medicine, and her point is that people keep trying to solve medical problems, active acne, stubborn pigmentation, with decoration, and then wondering why the decoration did not work.
There is a reason the advice runs against the grain, and it is not that people are foolish. A dermatology appointment costs money and time, often involves a wait, and lacks the immediate dopamine of a new product in a pretty jar. The internet is free, instant, and generous with confident strangers. But what Palmer is doing is the one thing the professionals keep pointing at: the months spent cycling through the wrong products, some of which actively damage the skin barrier or deepen pigmentation, frequently cost more than the appointment would have, in money and in setbacks. The esthetician Alicia Lartey, quoted in the same Refinery29 report, went so far as to say a powerful prescription drug like tretinoin should never have gone viral in the first place, calling it “irresponsible of influencers” to promote something most of them have “no background in skincare” to explain.
What makes Palmer a persuasive messenger is that she has no incentive to send anyone to a doctor. She is not a dermatologist, she is not selling a clinic, and she could easily have answered the beauty-interview question the way famous people usually do, with a product she loves and a routine to envy. Instead she used her turn to say the least glamorous true thing in the category, which is that the fastest route to good skin often runs through a waiting room. “Don’t be afraid to take that step and help yourself,” she said, and the help she means is the kind that requires an appointment, a diagnosis, and the humility to be guided, none of which will ever trend, all of which tend to work.
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