A Little Is Enough: How Much Cream, Oil and Mask Your Skin Needs
How much cream, oil and mask your face and body really need, how often to use a scrub or a mask, and what you gain by taking only what you need.
A litre of oil holds about twenty thousand drops. Pharmacists count a drop as one twentieth of a millilitre. A face needs one to three drops of argan oil.
Taken one to three drops each morning from the same litre bottle, that oil would last one person from eighteen to almost fifty-five years. At one drop a day, you could leave it in your will.
The sum is half a joke. The other half is useful: skin needs far less than fits in the palm of a hand, whether the palm holds a cream, an oil or a mask.
Oil made when it was needed
In the Amazigh villages of south-western Morocco, where my family comes from, argan oil was made by hand, at home, in slow and heavy work (how argan oil was made by hand).
In the heat and sun of that country, oil made this way could not wait long. The women made it when the household needed it, as much as it needed.
Today a cool place, shade from the sun and dark amber glass, like our bottle, do that work for the oil. Kept that way, it waits calmly.
Few things and a great deal of time: that is also the shape of the weekly hammam in many Moroccan families, with Moroccan soap, a scrubbing glove and clay.
Bread from the road
Between 1898 and 1926 the Finnish ethnographer Edward Westermarck recorded how people lived and what they believed across Morocco, from Tangier and Fez to the Souss. He also wrote down how bread was treated.
Bread, agrum in the Amazigh dialects, carried baraka, a blessing. Whoever found a piece of bread on the road was expected to pick it up, kiss it and eat it, take it home, or put it somewhere nobody would walk. It was believed that the bread would kiss him in return, which meant he would have plenty of bread.
Whoever ate the last remainder of a dish was said to have eaten its baraka too. Crumbs found on the ground were sometimes thought to hold even more.
The same care for tomorrow reached the handmill of the Ait Warain: however hungry they were, they never left it quite empty, so that there would be corn to grind in future.
A drop of oil works much the same way, minus the kiss.
The bathroom today
Take the bathroom shelf.
Most shelves have their own archaeology. At the bottom lies last winter's cream, behind it a gift still waiting for its occasion, then a small hotel bottle kept for some trip, and at the front three bottles that do roughly the same thing. Each one was bought for a good reason.
Dermatologists see those shelves from the consulting room. In a survey published in 2026, 168 dermatologists and trainees in the Netherlands were asked what they think of skincare routines. For healthy skin in women, they recommend about three steps, which is good news for anyone with ten minutes in the morning. Nine in ten said they were concerned by the growing popularity of long routines, and almost two in three named a higher risk of irritation as the reason.
All of it arrives in the same place, the outermost layer of the skin. That layer is between one and four hundredths of a millimetre thick, built from fifteen to twenty rows of flattened cells. Everything a cream, an oil or a mask does happens there.
At the end of 2020 Pinterest put the word skinimalism among its trends for the coming year, for a simple routine and slower beauty. English has an older word for it: enough.
A shelf is easiest to sort out slowly: what is already there gets used in the right measure, and the new thing arrives when the old one has genuinely run out. The gift waiting for its occasion could have it tomorrow.
How much face cream to use
At the counter I tell customers to put on only as much as makes one light layer, and to paint it on their face.
Three measures cover almost everything: a drop, a pea and a thin layer.
Cream: a pea
A pea is smaller than it sounds. In dentistry it is an agreed measure for toothpaste: a quarter of a gram. That much cream, warmed between the fingertips, is enough for the face.
With AFOULKI, our face cream with argan oil and prickly pear seed oil, press the pump lightly, once. That gives you a pea, and a pea is the dose for the whole day. Skin stays hydrated and soft to the touch.
Oil: drop by drop
Oil goes on last, while the skin is still slightly damp from washing or the shower. Dermatologists give the same advice for cream, and on damp skin even a few drops spread further.
Our argan oil sinks in quickly and leaves the skin with a natural glow, and at a few drops a day a 30 ml bottle lasts for months. The easiest way to see how far one drop goes is on the back of your hand. You can try it at our shop in Sarajevo City Centar.
Mask: a thin layer, once or twice a week
Apply TIFAWT, our mask with Blue Nila and prickly pear seed oil, to clean skin: press your fingertips lightly into the jar and spread the mask over the face, rather than lifting it out in lumps. Leave it for ten to fifteen minutes, away from the eyes, then rinse with water. At once or twice a week, a 200 g jar lasts up to two years.
Body and scrubs
For the body, dermatologists advise a shower of five to ten minutes in warm water, and moisturising straight afterwards, while the skin is still damp.
For exfoliating they have a simple rule: the stronger the scrub, the less often it is needed. Washing follows a similar logic. Every wash takes away some of the oil the skin makes itself along with the dirt, so a face wants washing, not scouring.
After TAFUKT, our body polish with coffee and argan oil, the skin is pleasantly oiled once rinsed, the oil sinks in well, and the softness lasts two to four days. That is why once or twice a week is enough. A little goes a long way.
A bottle you really get to know
Measure has one pleasant consequence: what you use lasts. It stays long enough for you to know it properly, how it smells, how it behaves in winter, exactly how much of it you need. Mornings are shorter and the shelf is easier to read. And with fewer things on the face, it is easier to see which of them really suit you.
There is a quiet satisfaction in it too: reaching the bottom of a bottle slowly, knowing every drop went on the face and none on the pillow or the towel.
I think we have all grown too used to going through a great deal of product and putting on more of it than we need. With our products, the small measure has a reason you can read on the ingredient list. A bottle of our argan oil holds one ingredient, so every drop is a whole drop of argan. Argan oil and prickly pear seed oil work on the skin like a lid that helps it hold on to its water, and a thin layer is enough for that.
The ingredients we bring deserve to be used with measure. We develop and make our products with more than 160 women's collectives across Morocco, and we buy our ingredients directly from them.
A litre holds about twenty thousand drops. This morning, the face needed a few.
The rest can wait.