Paris
Where the best skincare advice is passed down between generations
Paris’s real flex is the skincare routine a French grandmother would have had and her grandmother before that. It’s inherent in the culture; French thermal spas trace back centuries and are still prescribed by doctors today: roughly half a million people a year attend a state-subsidised cure thermale for skin conditions including eczema and psoriasis.
Despite this, the city isn’t without its challenges – dense traffic, air pollution and the urban heat island effect, where built-up areas experience higher temperatures, making central Paris meaningfully hotter than the surrounding countryside. Parisian skin culture meets those challenges with the oldest, most proven remedies applied consistently over the years.
Steal the strategy: Avène Thermal Spring Water Spray is bottled directly from the same source used in actual cures thermales – a genuinely useful way to calm irritated skin in a heatwave or after a flight. La Roche-Posay Anthelios UVMune 400 is the sunscreen many consultant dermatologists actually recommend, with a featherlight texture that disappears under makeup. For a retinol that works even for sensitive skin, Pers 0.3% Pro-Retinol Serum was developed by leading French aesthetic doctor Antoni Calmon.
Seoul
Where your skincare routine works with the seasons
Seoul’s climate is not kind. Summers arrive hot and humid, bringing extra oil, breakouts and a skin barrier that struggles to keep up. Winters are cold, dry and often thick with air pollution. And then there’s the seasonal yellow dust that blows in from China and Mongolia – which is, incidentally, why surgical masks became a beauty habit here long before 2020.
The Seoul response to all of this is skincare rotation. Korean skincare leads the world in textures and formats specifically designed to adapt – lighter lotions and spray serums work in high humidity where heavy creams would suffocate skin; antioxidant-rich formulas with vitamin C, niacinamide and green tea extract do the year-round pollution defence work.