With countless recommendations from celebrities, Instagram influencers, and digital publications, splurging on a new face mask should be an easy and fun thing to do — right? As any beauty-obsessed online shopper will tell you, this couldn’t be further from the truth. When you have dozens of your favorite blogs curating lists of the best face masks on a weekly basis, narrowing down which one is actually worth buying can be slightly overwhelming (#firstworldproblems, I know).
Hear me out, though. When the majority of your waking hours are spent working, commuting, and sweating it out at the gym, you want to make sure every minute (and dollar) you spend on your skin care routine is well worth it. For many — myself included — that 10-minute act of self-care is a sacred ritual: the quiet, the solitude, the sensation of all the day’s built-up tension melting away as you massage your moisturizer from your T-zone towards your temples.
But let’s not kid ourselves. We’re doing this for the results, too. As meditative as the act of applying skin care products can be, at the end of the day, the motivating factor is results we can see. So of course, we only want to be using the best and most effective formulas. Especially when it comes to masks — the most important step for anyone looking to chill the eff out and solve a specific skin issue at the same time.
As someone who has used — and written about — hundreds of masks, I’m here to give you my top, holy grail picks. And why should you trust me over the countless other beauty writers and editors out there, you might ask? Well, I don’t really have a good answer to that, except that I created this list with a jaded skin care junkie (me; you) in mind. If you’re reading this, you can probably see through the B.S. articles that claim every one of the 17 masks on this list will shrink yourpores. No, this is simply a compendium of the best face masks I’ve ever tried — for every type of skin care concern. No gimmicky gold or bubbles, no irritating peel-off gels, and definitely not a single glitter-infused formula in sight.