A Healthy Skincare Diet

plus a Japanese sunscreen recommendation

Welcome readers, old and new!

Please hit the ❤️ button to send a lovely feeling of chill to all stressed-out HNTFUYF-ers.

You often ask me, dear readers, if there are any beauty product recommendations I can make from my sojourns in Tokyo. My first instinct has always been reluctance to recommend anything unavailable in the U.S. (or anywhere outside Asia) because… well, unhelpful.

Though the beauty market in Japan is robust (according to one source, its beauty and personal care market is projected to reach over $47 billion this year), the products are pretty much the same as in the U.S.—by which I mean, not magical or even special, with the exception of the sunscreens. I like sunscreens by the Japanese brand FANCL and it looks like you can buy them here. And here’s a moment to acknowledge my friends at Japanese-owned Shiseido, who also make fine sunscreens, but I’m not sure whether theirs, or the ones from FANCL, are exactly the same as you can get in Asia because of FDA regulations. (I’ve asked about this and am awaiting an answer.)

One category overwhelming Tokyo’s drugstore beauty shelves is collagen products— from topicals to ingestibles—which promise healthier, plumper, more unlined skin. Serendipitously, a reader recently had a question about the effects of collagen supplements, so it seemed an appropriate query to address my first week back in Tokyo.

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