The skincare I do on the train
On the small portable version of my evening routine that I do on long train journeys — and why the train, of all places, has become a good place to take care of the face.
I take, perhaps once a month, a long train somewhere — three or four hours, sometimes more. The trains here are quiet, the windows are large, the rhythm is steady. For most of the years I have been taking these trains, I would arrive at the destination with a slightly tired face, a slightly dry mouth, a slightly stale feeling that the journey had left in me.
About two years ago I started doing a small portable version of my evening routine on the train, somewhere in the middle of the journey. The routine takes about ten minutes. It uses three small things that fit in a side pocket of a bag. The face that arrives at the destination is a different face than the one that boarded.
The three things in the side pocket
A small bottle of micellar water, about thirty millilitres, in a plain bottle from a refill shop. Three or four cotton pads in a small plastic envelope. A tin of solid moisturiser balm, about the size of a coin. That is it. The whole kit weighs perhaps fifty grams. It lives in the bag I take on trains, never removed.
What I do, somewhere around hour two of the journey
Walk to the small toilet in the carriage. The trains here have unusually clean small bathrooms with a basin and a window. I lock the door, set the kit on the small shelf, and do a short version of the evening face routine. The micellar water on a cotton pad, wiping gently across the face to remove the small accumulation of pollution and oil that travel inevitably deposits. A second pad to remove the residue. Then a small amount of the balm pressed into the skin with warm fingers.
The whole thing takes about five minutes. I walk back to the seat with a face that has been recently attended to, settle in for the second half of the journey, and the rest of the train passes differently. The body, given a small act of self-care in the middle of a long day, responds the way bodies respond to small acts of self-care — with a slight settling, a slight return to baseline.
Why this matters more on a train than at home
Because the train is, for most people, a small zone of suspended time. There is nothing useful you can do for several hours. The window goes past. The book is read in small portions. The phone signal is bad. The journey is a small pause in the rest of the week, and the pause can be used badly — by scrolling, by half-sleeping, by feeling vaguely tired — or it can be used to slip in a small act of care that the rest of the week does not have room for.
The train face routine has, accidentally, become one of the small luxuries of taking the train. The destination matters less. The journey itself has become a small portable spa, with five minutes of slow attention in a small clean bathroom as its centrepiece. The face arrives ready for whatever is next, and the body arrives with a small amount of having been quietly cared for, and the train, for those reasons, has become the part of the trip I most look forward to.