How to schedule skincare steps you don't do every day

How often is the label's call

Masks and other occasional products are the steps people most often ask a schedule about, and the answer is not ours to give. Where a product's directions say how often to use it, follow them: they were written for that one formula, and a general rule was not.

Where the directions say nothing, there is no number to look up, and this page is not going to invent one. What a schedule can do is take a frequency you already have and make it happen on real days.

Why a weekly step does not belong in a daily routine

The tempting move is to add the weekly mask to your evening routine and skip it on the other six nights. It looks tidy and it quietly breaks the routine.

A daily routine with a step you skip most days teaches you that skipping steps is normal. Once that is normal, it is no longer clear which skips are planned and which are drift, and the routine stops being a list you trust.

The fix is to keep the daily routine true every day: everything in it happens every time it runs.

Give the occasional day its own version of the routine

On the days the occasional step happens, run a version of your routine that includes it. On the other days, run the version that does not. A Sunday mask becomes a Sunday evening routine: your usual evening steps, with the mask in its place among them.

The rest of the week keeps the evening routine you already have, and nothing in it is a step you skip.

The cost is small and worth naming: when you change a product in your evening routine, change it in both versions.

Pick days by how your week actually runs

Choose days you reliably have a little more time on, not the days a calendar makes look even. An occasional step that lands on your busiest evening is an occasional step you will move, and a step that keeps moving has no schedule at all.

If you missed the day, the next one is the next scheduled day. Follow the product's directions rather than inventing a make-up session.

How Glossa schedules it

In Glossa a schedule belongs to a routine, not to a single step. Every routine starts as every day, and you choose the days of the week it runs on.

The button in the scene opens one routine for each time of day: the one scheduled for today that matches morning or evening. So give each evening exactly one evening routine. For a Sunday mask, set your usual evening routine to Monday through Saturday, and build a Sunday evening routine with the same steps and the mask, set to Sunday.

When two evening routines share a day, the button opens the one higher in your list of routines. Keeping the days of the two versions apart is what makes each evening open the right one.

A streak counts the days a routine is scheduled on. The Sunday routine builds its streak week by week, and a day outside a routine's schedule never counts against it.

The number of routines is not limited, and none of this sits behind the subscription.

Products get onto the shelf from one photo of them. What the photo reads is matched against a catalog of 19,550 products from 6,006 brands, and if something is not in there you add it by hand.

What Glossa does not do

Glossa is not a health product. It does not look at your skin, and it does not tell you what to put on it.

It keeps the days you chose. How often a product should be used stays with the product's directions and with you.

iPhone only, and Android is not planned.

Glossa at a glance

• Platform: iPhone, iOS 17 or later
• Android: no, and not planned
• Price: $6.99 per month, or $39.99 per year
• Free trial: 3 days, on both plans
• Schedule: per routine, by day of the week; every day by default
• Routines: as many as you need, without the subscription
• From the scene: one routine each morning and each evening, the one scheduled for today
• Products in the catalog: 19,550 from 6,006 brands
• Accounts: none, nothing to sign up for
• Analytics: none, on the site or in the app
• On the App Store: not yet