When Kelly Rowland walks into the room, her skin is already glowing. It’s only 7 a.m., and she hasn’t even started her skin-care routine. She is days away from her 45th birthday, and when I ask her what era she’s in, she can’t put a specific label to it. “I’m so grateful,” she says. In the past year, she’s been in a movie and finished a tour: “It was 15 years since I toured the States, and I had so many records that were successful overseas, and at one point in time, I was like, Do they still rock with me?” Spoiler alert: We do still rock with Kelly.
And that’s an understatement. Clips of her opening the Boy Is Mine tour flooded social media all fall with people commenting on how radiant she has remained since her Destiny’s Child days. In the past few weeks, clips of her started circulating again, this time from the movie she filmed last year, Amazon Prime’s Relationship Goals. The romantic comedy explores her character’s relationships romantically, but also as a friend, mom, and wife. It’s all the relationships she values in her real life, too.
Here’s how Rowland gets her skin so good.
Step 1: Double Cleanse (Sometimes Triple)
One cleanser is not enough for Rowland, and sometimes, two isn’t enough, either: “I’m usually putting on so much makeup days at a time, and it builds up … I want everything off of my skin.” It’s not just the makeup she’s worried about, but also environmental factors. She wants squeaky-clean skin, so first she uses iS Clinical’s cleansing complex, a classic non-stripping gel cleanser. She follows it with Shani Darden’s cleansing serum, a lightweight cleanser with the texture of a serum but a generous lather that removes everything from the skin without leaving it dry. Darden has been her aesthetician for 11 years; her products are constantly restocked in Rowland’s routine. She then uses Clean Skin Club towels to help her skin’s barrier stay healthy.
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New! You can now save this product for later.
Step 2: Apply a Serum
Next, Rowland applies a serum, only one for her morning routine, very different from her nighttime routine, which is loaded with serums (including her favorite Shani Darden retinol). Her easy morning choice is Olay’s Super Serum, a blend of ingredients that brighten and hydrate the skin. Rowland’s serum rule is no rubbing; instead, she presses it in.
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Olay Super Serum
Step 3: Apply Moisturizer
She follows up with a moisturizer, usually Shani Darden’s hydration peptide cream, a peptide-rich moisturizer with squalane that locks in moisture while protecting the skin’s barrier. It’s a dry-skin-friendly cream, and Rowland has eczema, so intense nourishment is what she needs. This always does the trick.
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Step 4: Apply Facial Mist
To finish her skin-care routine, she applies Vintner’s Daughter’s active treatment essence, a mist that her makeup artist, Sheika Daley, got her hooked on. Rowland’s only disclaimer: “It stinks, but it doesn’t matter, because the effect on your skin after you spray it is game changing.” The mist does smell like apple-cider vinegar, so hold your breath, but it’s efficacious. It’s packed with antioxidants, vitamin C, a stem-cell complex, and more. She loves using it as the final step in her routine, the perfect makeup prep.
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Step 5: Apply a Lip Balm
She can’t forget about her lips. Laneige’s shea-butter lip balm is her go-to for lips that are hydrated and have a nice sheen to them.
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Her beauty nonnegotiable:
Going to bed with makeup on. It’s a hard no for her. No matter how late it is, the makeup is coming off before she closes her eyes. “Even my husband knows I won’t go to sleep with it on, so he will help me take it off. My sister has done that for me in Paris, too. My people know me. Don’t even send me to bed with that makeup on.”
On how aging has sharpened her confidence:
“I used to be very afraid of aging, because I watched society not celebrate it. It wasn’t until recently that I started to watch incredible women like Halle Berry, Helen Mirren, Angela Bassett, and my Mama T (Tina Knowles), who are making aging elegant, sexy, and beautiful and all that it is, and I kind of love it. You just allow yourself to really, really be in your glory and in your body and skin. To me, that is really dope, because I’ve acquired so much wisdom. It just gets greater later.”
The one product that made her jaw drop:
As a skin-care enthusiast, Rowland jumps up and down praising the Plated skin science intense serum, an anti-aging exosome-technology serum. She uses it as a neck serum, but she was most impressed by the way it healed her burned skin. Before going onstage one time, she burned herself with a curling iron, and within eight days this serum completely removed her scar. The healing properties in it speed up the process of repairing skin. She holds onto it for her neck, but also for any unwanted scarring.
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Plated Intense Serum
On giving up alcohol:
It’s been “a year and some change” since the singer and actress stopped drinking alcohol. “People always say it’s toxic for the skin, and I thought they were just saying that, but they were right.”
Her date-night rule:
If you catch Rowland out on a date night with her husband, just know she smells good, really good. “I think you kind of intoxicate people with a scent; it’s how people remember you,” she says. It’s sexiest to her when she wears a signature scent that lingers, and she is keen on gatekeeping her personal signature scent. But she does love to layer, and what she will tell us is that she layers rose and oud oils in their purest form.