Notes from a
Seoul bathroom shelf.

We spent the first half of last year photographing the bathroom shelves of customers who said yes to letting us in. Forty-one apartments across Seoul, three across Tokyo, two in Los Angeles. We were not looking for product placement. We were looking for what an edited shelf actually looks like in someone’s real, occupied bathroom.

The pattern was unmistakable. Edited shelves had four things, almost always: a single cleansing oil, a single moisturizer (often a balm rather than a cream), a quiet sunscreen, and one treatment-class product the owner thought of as their "extra." The extra was almost never marketed to them as essential. They had chosen it on their own.

There was no eighth-step toner. There was no second cleanser. There was certainly no acid. We are not making a normative argument here — many people love a longer routine, and that is fine — but the specific, unglamorous truth is that the people whose hair and skin we wanted to photograph the most were running four products, not twelve.

The other thing every shelf had in common was that the four objects on it looked like they belonged together without trying. They were not the same brand. They were rarely the same color. But the proportions were similar — small, weighted, glass or ceramic — and the labels were quiet enough that the eye went to the objects instead.

When we designed the Meori bottle, that was the brief: belong on a shelf with three things you already love. Not match them. Just belong.