How are you all actually tracking whether your routine is working, especially for redness/texture that changes day to day?

i feel like i'm going a little insane trying to evaluate my skin objectively.

some issues are obvious if they get really bad, but for stuff like redness, texture, oiliness, and post-acne marks, i honestly can't tell if i'm improving or just seeing something different because of lighting, sleep, my cycle, stress, etc. one morning my skin looks calm, that night it looks

irritated, then 3 days later i think it's "better" but i have no idea if that's real or if i'm just comparing it to a worse day.

right now i've tried:

- taking photos, but they never look the same unless the lighting is identical

- waiting 6 to 8 weeks before judging anything, which makes sense in theory but is hard when your skin fluctuates a lot

- focusing on feel instead of appearance, which helps for dryness but not really for redness or clogged-looking texture

- changing only one variable at a time, but sometimes life itself is the variable

what do you all use as your actual benchmark for progress?

like, do you track by:

- weekly photos in the same spot/light

- counting active breakouts

- rating redness/oiliness/dryness on a scale

- tracking by facial area instead of whole face

- just ignoring daily changes and looking at monthly trends

i'm especially curious how people here handle conditions that are noisy and inconsistent. acne at least feels countable. diffuse redness, uneven tone, random irritation, and "my skin just looks off" are so much harder to measure.

if anyone has a method that's more science-y than vibes, i'd love to hear it. not asking for routine recs really, more how you separate actual improvement from normal fluctuation and

confirmation bias.