my facialist told me something that made me rethink every expensive product i owned

been getting facials every six weeks for about three years, love the ritual of it, love treating myself, and my facialist is genuinley incredible, knows my skin really well at this point.

at my last appointment she was looking at my skin and asked me something that caught me off guard, she said can i ask what ur doing between appointments bc ur skin is not holding the results the way it should be and i was a bit taken aback honestly bc i thought i was doing everything right, using good products, following her advice, spending properly on my routine.

she asked specifically about spf and i admitted i was wearing it maybe three or four days a week, skipping it when i was working from home or when it was cloudy, and she just stopped and said that is undoing almost everything we do in here, she explained that the brightening treatments and the hydration work she does gets reversed really quickly without daily spf protecting it, like literally undoing the results within days of exposure.

i felt so stupid bc i spend so much on facials and good products and was sabotaging all of it by skipping spf on days i thought it didnt matter.

started wearing uv filters spf 50 every single morning without exception, didnt change anything else, and at my next appointment six weeks later she said my skin was holding the results so much better and the pigmentation she had been working on had actually visibly faded which it hadnt been doing before.

the most expensive thing in my routine is the facial and the cheapest thing turned out to be the most important step.

has anyone else been told something by a professional that completely changed how they approached their routine?