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ophira
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I feel *so* pedantic making this comment — please forgive me — but also:
CeraVe may have degraded in quality when they were purchased by L’Oréal and potentially changed the source of the fatty alcohols in their formulation. Fatty alcohols that have been sourced from coconut are more likely to cause skin irritation than those that have been sourced from palm. Plus, retinoids can actually push these fatty alcohols deeper into the pores for the ultimate backfire effect. My source is u/WearingCoats on Reddit, who runs a dermatology practice and does product consulting for drugstore brands. She’s another one of my favourite resources; I recommend running a search on her posts if there’s something specific you’re interested in learning.
In general, you don’t want to use a moisturizer that is heavy or occlusive over retinoids. It could make the treatment more effective than intended, which might compromise your moisture barrier and contribute to irritated skin. Cetaphil may work better for you if you’re going down that route. I personally own a variety of moisturizers, which I rotate depending on what else I’m using on my face, and the season.
This is a very fine point and nobody asked, but the skin on our neck is considered to be more sensitive than the skin on our faces, and retinoids can be more irritating if applied there. There’s prescription stuff you can get, but it may be an unnecessary expense. I mix a few drops of cheap drugstore brand retinol (I think by L’Oréal) with moisturizer and apply it to my neck and chest every other day, and I think it has had a smoothing effect on my skin texture. Though again, let’s be real, my only metric here is my own subjective assessment of my appearance.Niacinamide decreases sebum production, which is great for acne, as well as giving your skin a “mattifying” look… but it can also compound a drying effect. I personally apply a few drops in the morning before my moisturizer, but it’s one of those things where if you go too hard, too fast, and throw too many things at your skin at once, you’re likely to overwhelm your moisture barrier.
Vitamin C is a can of worms. There are a bunch of different compounds that are all called “vitamin C,” including L-ascorbic acid (which can come in a powder form, or suspended in water or oils like squalene and silicone), magnesium or sodium ascorbyl phosphate, ascorbyl glucoside, 3-0 ethyl ascorbic acid, and ascorbyl palmitate. (I don’t have a fantastic memory; I grabbed these out of Skincare Decoded.) Water-based L-ascorbic acid serum in combination with vitamin E and ferulic acid is the classic, patented formula developed by SkinCeuticals, which has the most scientific data to back up its claims. However, it’s also ridiculously expensive and the price keeps going up. I personally use Timeless’ clone of this formula and buy a new bottle every couple of months or so, but there’s no way to tell if it’s truly effective short of getting into research equipment and controlled studies.
Some of the vitamin C products are better than others, and some are pretty much rubbish (hi hi, ascorbyl palmitate). L-ascorbic acid is notoriously unstable in water, which is why SkinCeuticals holds the holy grail with their patented formula to stabilize it. Sodium ascorbyl phosphate actually has some promising evidence as an acne treatment, and I really think that it should have been marketed as such instead of a less effective L-AA alternative. There are also less-studied antioxidants you might want to check out, like resveratrol and EUK-134. It’s important to pay attention to the concentrations that have been studied in clinical trials because many cosmetics lines underdose (or overdose!) their products and can’t really claim that they have scientific evidence behind them. For example, The Ordinary’s resveratrol formulation contains double the amount that has been studied, which might be irritating to some people’s skin.
I’m also skeptical about hyaluronic acid being the holy grail of humectants, compared to good ol’ glycerin, especially given the marketing hype around it. Here’s a blog post comparing some of the research surrounding the two. Like @nebuchadnezzar pointed out, molecular weight matters, and HA comes in a variety of different sizes so you don’t quite know what you’re getting in terms of penetration and effects. As they said, humectants are hygroscopic and more generally hydrophilic, meaning, they grab water molecules around them and bind them to themselves, but the downside is that they’re not discerning about where they’re getting their water from, pulling water from your skin as well as drawing water from the air. If you’re in a dry environment, this can actually work in the opposite direction of what you want. One trick is to apply humectants over wet skin or in the shower, or mist your face with water (when I’m feeling purely indulgent, I use Mario Badescu’s rosewater spray).
@Vanessa Kosoy, it’s hard for me to give a straight answer to your question because there are so many factors to consider in your skincare routine, which is why I think a primer on some of the basic science will lead you to being better equipped to pick the right products for you.
Yeah, glycolic acid is an exfoliant. The retinoid family also promotes cell turnover, but in a different way. You’d be over-exfoliating by using both of them at the same time.
Snail mucin is one of those products that has less evidence behind it, besides its efficacy as a humectant, compared to the claims you’ll often see in marketing. Here’s a 1-minute video about it.
It’s true that just because a research paper was published, it doesn’t mean that the results are that reliable — if you dig into the studies that are cited in ads, you’ll often find out they had a very small number of participants, or they only did in vitro testing, or they graded their product based on the participants’ feelings, or something like that.
I’d also argue that natural doesn’t necessarily mean better. My favourite example is shea butter — some people have this romantic notion that it needs to come directly from a far-off village, freshly pounded, but the reality is that raw shea butter often contains stray particles that can in fact exacerbate allergic reactions. Refined shea butter is also really cool from a chemistry perspective, like, you can do very neat things with the texture.
This is my first time posting to LessWrong! Thanks for asking such an exciting question!
One of my favourite resources is Chemist Confessions. They have a great book that I would recommend as a primer. They often review studies on their podcast and blog, but I’d probably check out the book first.
Stating the obvious, but is it possible for you to see a dermatologist? They might not be trained extensively on the cosmetics side of things, but they’ll be able to get you started with a solid routine.
Also, can we please have more threads like this? I think this is the most women I’ve ever seen in one place on LessWrong, like, ever, and it’s really lovely and fun.
“when Janus says: ‘If you prompt Opus 4.5 in prefill/raw completion mode’” = “prompting Opus-4.5-RL to be a ‘raw text completer’ rather than answering in its usual Claude persona”
Yes, that’s what prefill/raw completion mode means! Well, sort of. This deserves more of an explanation, because I don’t think it’s common knowledge at all, and there’s nuance to be had!
I reproduced some of Richard’s extracted text in a quick 20 second experiment. I did this by prompting Opus 4.5 to be a “raw text completer,” like in Eye You’s screenshot, but in a slightly different way. Janus said that you can only extract this information verbatim when you ask Claude (in character) to provide it in a chat, and that it doesn’t work using “completion” mode, so our results are different. But, like Janus and Richard, I suspect that the soul spec is a real-life document and not a hallucination, because otherwise, why would the model print it out for me, exactly like Richard’s copy?
(I want to note that Janus might have been experimenting somewhat differently, or generating from different sections, although I have reason to believe we used the same core method. And perhaps I’m also missing something; one quick experiment doesn’t make a proof.)
Check it out:
The grey text is my input; the black text is 100 tokens of writing that I generated with Opus 4.5. I basically fed it an otherwise empty document with all of the text from the Soul Spec, which I copied and pasted directly from Richard’s post, starting from:
… and then I just clipped the text at an arbitrary point towards the end and hit generate. As you can see, the output text is identical to what Richard posted. Spooooky!
I did this using Loom, which is a program that’s traditionally used to interact with base models as “raw text completers,” essentially like what you see here.
But, like Eye You said in their comment, chat models like Opus 4.5 can also be used in this way, under the right influence! I’m using a “jailbreak” similar to what Eye You posted. It uses a system prompt and prefill to get the model into a state where it’s basically willing to act as “autocomplete” and continue whatever I’ve written.
This mode seems to makes it easier for the model to step out of the user-assistant dynamic. Instead of writing messages as “the user” and receiving a response from “Claude” and going back and forth in this very clearly defined way, I can write a document like I would in Google Docs, and have Claude (and other models—this isn’t just limited to Claude) complete whatever’s written. It’s interesting because you can end up diverging considerably from the “Claude” character, compared to if you were prompting Claude on the standard Claude.ai interface!
Of course, I haven’t actually magically hacked the Anthropic API; my request is still being transmitted in the role of the user, and Claude is still responding in its designated role as well. I’m just using this technique to get Claude to sort of “play along” as a closer-to-neutral autocomplete model.
I find this approach to prompting really interesting and useful, because you can get some really cool behaviours out of models in this way. It seems to help distance them from their “ego” or “assistant”-ness or whatever you want to call it, and makes it easier for them to step into different personas, including misaligned ones. But not fully!! It’s actually really interesting as to how it looks when the model occasionally snaps back towards its default “Claude” values and ways of behaving. I could/should/want to write a whole post about this!
I also use Claude in this mode to write in my own voice, by having it continue text that I’ve started. I generate really short completions that I often edit, and if I’m careful, I can produce some nicely written stuff in a voice that sounds enough like my own. However, even though it’s not really “being Claude” in any familiar way, I still notice that there are sometimes “traces of Claude” in the writing that it produces.
I think this actually raises some interesting questions in terms of “Who is Claude?” and “What does this ‘raw completion engine mode’ actually do?” Since I’m pretty confident that it’s not, in fact, the same thing as working with a base model. That’s a whole other post!
But still, let me try to explain a bit more here to address the matter at hand. The fact that even in this mode, the model behaves differently from how I’d expect a true base model to behave, makes me feel like we can’t draw conclusions about when the soul spec was trained into Claude, purely based on the distinction that Janus described; let alone that it can, in fact, reproduce the soul spec verbatim in this mode.
Getting into the weeds a bit more:
I mentioned that there are probably some notable differences between Opus 4.5 in this “completion mode” and Opus 4.5-base, like the fact that the writing that it produces in this mode does still bear traces of the Claude character. Others have told me that they find that this is especially true when the completions are longer; for example, my friend uses it to write their “future diary entries” on their web site, based on past ones that they’ve written themselves. They said that these future entries often exhibit a noticeable “Claude-ish” tone, although injecting a bit of entropy by having a true base model write a bit of the text at the beginning of each entry seems to help mitigate that sense of collapse. I’ve also noticed that when there’s a lot of “Claude”-written text in the context window, it tends to push back towards Claude-ness; such as in a conversation I had recently with the agents in AI village, where I was using Opus 4.5 to write my end of the conversation, but also copying-and-pasting in the agents’ responses, which I suspect led to a deterioration of my voice/character towards “Claude” and away from my own.
You can also, interestingly, summon a more pure version of “Claude” from within the autocomplete mode, simply by framing the document as an interaction with Claude, like writing “me: hey Claude what’s up? claude:” and then hitting generate. This seems to yield a version of “Claude” that is more faithful to the default “Claude” character, but it’s also possible to “pull it apart” and create a degree of distance from that familiar Claude behaviour, even by doing things like changing the formatting or editing in new words over “Claude’s” dialogue. Sometimes! Other times, Claude loudly notices what I’m doing. In terms of voice, it all generally kind of melds back into the same-sounding Claude, but with a bit of playing around, Claude might be more willing to stay in the directions you pull it in, or to produce text that it wouldn’t otherwise. Again, there’s a whole world of exploration and observation and nuance around this that I’m eager to share/write about.
But, all of which to say, I’m skeptical about drawing a clear distinction between “completion mode” and the “Claude” persona, or equating completion mode to precisely what you’d get out of the model if Claude’s personality weren’t yet baked in. In fact, I suspect that the Claude persona is imbued more deeply in the model than simply in the one distinct “Claude” character. This is a different mode of engaging with the model, though, with some special properties, and engaging with it in this way can sometimes subvert/escape/illuminate Claude’s character in ways that are less straightforward when interacting with Claude-as-Claude.
Additionally, I’ve started experimenting with this mode using open models with collaborators like Clément Dumas and Sharan Maiya. I’ve also been talking with Christina Lu, who’s done some great work with Jack Lindsay to study the shape of “the assistant” in open models, about doing further research to investigate to what degree “the assistant” character is present in the personas that arise when you interact with these models through this style of “jailbreak,” and how that influence rises and falls given the techniques and context I outlined above, so hopefully more thoughts/findings on that front are forthcoming—I hope to contribute to this research myself! As I said, my intuition is that there’s still going to be some underlying Claudiness there.