How to find your skin type

The five skin types

• Oily: shiny across the whole face by midday, pores easy to see, makeup slides off.
• Dry: feels tight after washing, can flake or look dull, rarely shiny.
• Combination: oily T-zone (forehead, nose and chin) with normal or dry cheeks. This is the most common result on our skin test.
• Normal: comfortable most of the day, little shine, few breakouts.
• Sensitive: stings, itches or turns red with new products, fragrance, sun or heat.

Sensitive is less a separate type than a trait that sits on top of the others. You can be oily and sensitive, or dry and sensitive, and the routine has to respect both.

The bare-face check

You can get a good first answer at home tonight.

1. Wash your face with a gentle cleanser and lukewarm water. Pat it dry.
2. Put nothing on: no toner, no moisturiser, no sunscreen.
3. Wait about an hour, indoors, away from a fan or AC blowing on your face.
4. Look in a mirror in daylight, and press a clean tissue on your forehead, nose, cheeks and chin.

What you see tells you most of it:

• Oil on the tissue from every area, and shine everywhere: oily.
• No oil anywhere, and your skin feels tight or rough: dry.
• Oil from the forehead and nose only, cheeks clean or tight: combination.
• Little or no oil, and your skin feels comfortable: normal.

If your skin also stung after washing, or went red and blotchy, add sensitive to the answer.

Why your result can change with the season

In Bangladesh the same face can read differently in July and in January. Monsoon humidity makes skin look oilier than it really is. Winter, from mid-November to mid-February, dries it out, so combination skin can feel dry and dry skin can crack. Long days in an air-conditioned office dry skin out all year round.

Your skin type is what your skin does most of the year. Keep the same basic routine and adjust the textures with the season: a lighter gel in the humid months, a richer cream in winter. Our winter guide for dry skin covers that switch.

Dry or dehydrated?

These are often confused. Dry skin makes too little oil. Dehydrated skin is short of water, and it can happen to any skin type, including oily skin. The tell-tale sign is skin that feels tight and looks shiny at the same time. Dehydrated skin needs water-binding ingredients such as hyaluronic acid or snail mucin, not a heavier oil.

Take the 2-minute skin type test

The bare-face check tells you how oily your skin is. It does not tell you how sensitive it is, or what to do about it. Our free skin type test asks nine short questions:

• how your skin feels after washing, and where it shines by midday
• how visible your pores are, and how often you break out
• what happens when you try a new product
• whether you have dark spots, uneven tone, fine lines or loss of firmness
• what most of your day looks like: outdoors in the heat, a dusty commute, air-conditioning, or a mix
• what you most want to work on

It scores your answers on two scales, oily to dry and sensitive to resistant, to give your skin type. It then lists your main concerns and builds a routine of cleanser, treatment, moisturiser and sunscreen from products we have checked are original. Your daily environment does not change your skin type, but it changes which step the routine starts with.

There is no sign-up, and seeing your result needs no phone number and no email. You get a link you can save or share, and it shows the same result every time you open it.

What 301 people in Bangladesh found

In September 2026, 301 people took the skin test on skinmaxbd.com. They are our visitors, not a scientific sample, but the pattern is clear:

• Combination: 44%, dry: 32%, oily: 17%, normal: 7%
• Sensitive: 37% of everyone, across all types
• Dark spots: 85% named it as a concern, far ahead of dullness (51%), acne (51%) and dehydration (38%)

The surprise is how few people turn out to be oily. In the heat it is easy to assume your skin is oily and wash it with harsh products, when most people's cheeks are actually normal or dry. If you have been using strong oil-control products and your skin feels tight, take the test before buying anything else.

If you share that biggest concern, read our guide on how to fade dark spots.

When to see a dermatologist

A skin type test is a starting point for an everyday routine, not a diagnosis. See a dermatologist if you have painful or cystic acne, a rash that keeps coming back, patches that change shape or colour, or skin that reacts badly to almost everything.