Photo of woman looking over her skincare and cosmetic product collection – Photo courtesy of Lina Vanessa Merchán Jimenez from corelens
The first time I walked into a vaistinė, a Lithuanian pharmacy, I expected to feel out of place. But standing at that counter, watching the pharmacist ask a customer three questions before recommending a single product, I didn’t feel out of place at all; I felt like I was finally being told the truth about my skin.
Nobody warns you about this part of splitting your life between the American South and Lithuania. You brace yourself for the language barrier, the food, the in-laws who are only able to speak to you through your husband; what you don’t expect is coming home and throwing out half your medicine cabinet, too.
Here are the biggest beauty lessons I’ve learned from my time abroad, and the skincare tricks I now take home with me:
Here’s a number that stopped me cold: the European Union has banned or restricted over 1,600 substances in cosmetics. Alternatively, the United States has banned roughly a dozen.
That gap isn’t theoretical — it shows up on actual shelves. Phthalates like DBP and DEHP are banned in EU cosmetics and still turn up in American nail polish removers and scented soaps. Formaldehyde, a known carcinogen, remains legal in cosmetics sold across the US. Several parabens have been off the market in Europe since 2014, but are still standard in American drugstore products.
This isn’t Europe being precious; regulators there tend to act on early warning signs and animal studies, while US regulators wait for real-world evidence before restricting anything. Neither approach is purely right or wrong, but only one of them is currently protecting my skin by default, and it’s not the one I grew up with.
What surprised me is that you don’t have to move abroad to close that gap. Some of my own products are already reformulated for European shelves without me realizing it. My La Roche Posay moisturizer sold in the EU uses UV filters that are not FDA-approved here. CeraVe removes parabens from the versions sold in Europe. Neutrogena even swaps its sunscreen filters depending on which continent you are standing on.
The exact same brand name sits on two different formulas, and the American shopper is rarely the one getting the newer chemistry. Once I knew to look, I started shopping differently, leaning into brands like Live Tinted, which was built with deeper skin tones and hyperpigmentation in mind and skips the parabens, phthalates, and formaldehyde releasers. Ilia Beauty and a handful of smaller clean beauty labels are doing the same thing, quietly meeting European style restrictions while sitting on American shelves the whole time.
Clean skincare isn’t a European exclusive, it’s just easier to stumble into by accident over there, and it takes a little more intention to find here in the US.
2. Hydrate, hydrate, hydrate
Shop the best water bottle for hydration from Owala – Photo courtesy of Target
This one sounds too simple to matter, and that is exactly why I noticed it. I spent months living in Lithuania; while there, I kept looking for the sugary drink in someone’s hand, the extra large fountain soda, the energy drink at 10 a.m., and I never found it.
People carried water. Plain, boring, unbothered water. I’m not naive enough to think Lithuanians never touch sugar, but the default there is water — and the default here is something else.
Skin doesn’t know the difference between a serum and a habit. Hydration from the inside is doing quiet work that no amount of hyaluronic acid can fully replace, and I came home paying attention to my own glass for the first time in years!
My husband’s family doesn’t own a 12-step anything! Their homes are simple, their closets are simple — nobody is buying a new serum because an influencer told them their routine had a gap in it. And their skincare follows the same logic: a cleanser, something to moisturize, sun protection, and you’re done.
In America, a routine with fewer than eight steps can feel like you aren’t trying hard enough. I’ve stood in my own bathroom looking at a shelf of products I bought out of anxiety rather than need, half of them barely opened, all promising to fix something the last five did not.
Lithuanians get better skin with a quarter of what I own, using the same three products for years. Minimalism there isn’t a wellness aesthetic you opt into for a season. It’s just how people live — and their skin isn’t suffering for it.
4. Hyperpigmentation isn’t an overnight fix
Lithuanians approach skincare concerns differently with their beauty products and routines – Photo courtesy of 35069 from pixabay
I have a few dark spots, mostly leftover from old breakouts, and in the US, that comes with an entire industry built around erasing them fast. Dark spot correctors, brightening this, fading that, all promising results in weeks.
In Lithuania, the approach felt slower and less panicked. Pharmacists pointed me toward gentle exfoliation and consistent sun protection over anything marketed as an overnight fix, treating discoloration as something you manage patiently rather than something you attack.
Part of that comes down to regulation again. Hydroquinone, one of the most common skin lightening ingredients in American products, is banned for general cosmetic use in the EU over cancer concerns. Since a 2020 law tightened US rules, most hydroquinone here has shifted to prescription only, but for years it sat on drugstore shelves as an easy fix.
Slower alternatives like azelaic acid and niacinamide, both already staples in my own routine, are the norm there instead of the workaround. Sun protection followed the same quiet logic. Nobody I met treated SPF as optional or seasonal. It was just part of getting dressed — the same as putting on shoes, not a beach day accessory or a last-minute addition before you remembered you had somewhere to be.
I came home from Lithuania with a smaller bathroom shelf, a full water bottle, and a much longer ingredient list memorized. None of it required moving overseas to fix! It just required paying attention to what I’d been sold as normal, and asking whether normal was actually good enough.
