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How to Use Instagram as a Skin Diary

May 1, 2018 By Michelle 11 Comments

Affiliate Disclosure: I receive a small commission for purchases made via affiliate links.

As I discuss in my upcoming eBook, The Lab Muffin Guide to Basic Skincare, it’s important to keep a record of your skincare routine and skin condition. It’s a fantastic way to help you figure out what’s actually working for your skin, and track the products and ingredients that your skin reacts to. One really useful tool that you can use for this is Instagram.

There are a lot of ways you can utilise Instagram as a skin diary – here are some suggestions.

Instagram Posts

This is the most public and straightforward way, if you want to share your routine with other skincare addicts! There’s a huge community of skincare addicts out there who share their routines daily, and skincare product reviews too.

You can use hashtags to find other people’s skincare routines, and help them find yours. Some hashtags you can use are #365inskincare, #skincareroutine, #skincarecommunity, and #skincareaddict. Just stick these in the caption, and your post will show up when people search for that hashtag.

How to Use Instagram as a Skin Diary

You can also set up a private Instagram account – Instagram supports switching between multiple accounts, which is convenient if you already have a personal Instagram profile and want a separate skincare diary so you don’t freak out your friends.

Getting line breaks in Instagram captions is a little hit-and-miss – I use one of these spaces [⠀] in the “empty lines” which usually works.

Instagram Stories

Instagram Stories are an increasingly popular way to share routines. They’re more flexible than posts, with lots of inbuilt tools to customise them within the app.

How to Use Instagram as a Skin Diary
If you’re a stickler for having a certain “look” in the photos in your Instagram profile, stories also let you post less-than-perfect shots without worrying about styling and lighting.

Story Templates

I’ve recently discovered that templates are a brilliant way to track my skincare routine. They’re much more versatile than regular Instagram posts – there are text editing and drawing tools within Instagram’s stories feature, and you can choose to share the final product in a few different ways:

  • In your Stories, where it’ll disappear from public view automatically after 24 hours, but is still accessible to you
  • After it disappears from your Stories, you can also save the story to your Highlights to build a chronological archive
  • Save it to your phone without publishing it, if you’d rather keep it private

If you’re not familiar with Instagram’s story features yet, I’ve made a more detailed step-by-step guide here for how to edit and post stories, and the settings I use (it should download immediately once you click the link).

I’ve been messing around with template designs lately, and I’ve tweaked it to the point where it works pretty well for me.

Here are a couple that I’ve filled out:

How to Use Instagram as a Skin Diary How to Use Instagram as a Skin Diary

I made a few versions to try to cater for a range of people’s needs – feel free to save them to your phone, or you can screenshot them from the “Templates” collection in my Instagram Highlights. If you use them, I’d love to see how you do it – tag me with @labmuffinbeautyscience!

How to Use Instagram as a Skin Diary

Download Templates as Zip File

Direct links to download the individual templates (the download should start once you click the link):

  • AM/PM Routine
  • AM Routine and Notes
  • PM Routine and Notes
  • Skin and Lifestyle Notes

Photo Stories

If you find filling in these templates too time consuming, you can also take a photo of your products and add notes to that:

How to Use Instagram as a Skin Diary

You can also use selfies to track your skin progress.

I’ve personally found a combination of these methods works best for me. For tracking skin condition, I’ve found the Skin Notes part of the templates more useful than photos. It’s hard to really see issues like dehydration and sensitivity in selfies, but it’s useful for recording more visible things like acne and pigmentation.

I tend to change my routine only once a week or so. Depending on how lazy I’m feeling, I either use the AM/PM routine template to sketch out that week’s routine, or take a photo of the products. I fill in the Skin and Lifestyle Notes template every day or two, and put any day-to-day variations to the routine in there.

Do you track your skin? What do you use?


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Filed Under: Organisation, Skincare, Tutorial Tagged With: organisation, skincare, tutorial

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Comments

  1. Linda Libra Loca says

    May 2, 2018 at 9:14 pm

    I don´t change my skincare up too often, so that is actually a great idea without too much effort. As far as sharing my routines goes, I don´t do it on a regular, only occasionally at the moment. It is just too repetitive.

    Reply
  2. Penova Dewan says

    May 3, 2018 at 4:49 pm

    I don’t use Instagram!! But the tips are helpful

    Reply
  3. Renata Boyle says

    May 15, 2018 at 9:39 am

    Hi Michelle
    I’ve just bought your book ‘Guide to skincare’ and very much looking forward to reading it, I just know I am going to be boring the pants off 1. My husband, 2. My Friends and 3. Just about anyone I meet in a beauty department store (not that I shop much at beauty counters anymore).

    I just wanted to ask you though, if I had a specific question I wanted to ask, how would I go about that? I follow you on facebook and receive your emails but there doesn’t appear to be a comment box on FB at the top to write a post.

    You have replied to me before but I can’t remember where I asked the question, it might have been on your blog (I don’t use instagram).

    Reply
    • Michelle says

      May 15, 2018 at 8:59 pm

      You can just ask here 🙂

      Reply
  4. Raymond T says

    July 11, 2018 at 1:34 am

    absolutely appreciate your effort of creating and sharing the skin care routines. definitely should share this with more people! keep it up.

    Reply
  5. Jasmine K says

    July 11, 2018 at 8:16 pm

    thanks a lot for sharing the templates. this is easy to follow skin care routines. 🙂

    Reply
  6. Rashel Ahmed says

    January 23, 2019 at 10:06 pm

    Awesome tips. Its really useful.

    Reply
  7. Jenifa Lorens says

    September 24, 2019 at 3:11 am

    Great idea about skin care tips. Instagram can make a helpful routine, I didn’t know this idea. I can try this way. Thanks for your creative information.

    Reply
  8. hetal says

    December 18, 2019 at 4:39 pm

    thanks for showing to how to showcase your products it was helpfull

    Reply
  9. THE MORINGA BLOG says

    December 20, 2019 at 8:34 pm

    Amazing ideas about skin care. Thank you so much for sharing.

    Reply
  10. Susie Commode says

    January 24, 2020 at 5:20 pm

    From now, I going active on instagram for my skin care. thanks for the guide Michelle. 🙂

    Reply

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Michelle
Hi! I'm Michelle, chemistry PhD and science educator, and I'm here to help you figure out which beauty products are worth buying, and which ones aren't using science!

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