5 Necessary Steps to Keep Your Skin Glowing
Many of us have become lax or have even ditched our hair and makeup routines as we settle into life at home. It can be tempting to ditch your skincare routine, too, but it’s highly inadvisable. The key to achieving and maintaining great skin is consistency.
Continuing with your regular home care regimen, both morning and night, will help keep your complexion smooth and glowing.
You may not know this, but indoor aggressors like artificial light, house cleaning, and dirty cell phones can deprive skin of its vitality. Couple that with a lazy home care regimen and your likely to have one unhappy complexion! Your routine doesn’t need to be overly complicated or time consuming, it just needs to be consistent!
Many of the most common skin concerns such as premature aging, acne, and hyperpigmentation can be treated with a basic skincare routine and relatively minimal effort. We love this quote by Linden Tyler “Invest in your skin, it’s going to be with you for a long time.”
Here are our 5 necessary steps to keep your skin glowing:
Cleansing- gentle cleansing with a skin appropriate facial cleanser twice a day, every day. Oily/combination skin conditions do well with foaming cleansers while drier skin is better suited towards creamy/milky cleansers. DO NOT use body wash, soap, or other cleansing agents as they can strip the skin and create irritation. Our staff favorites include:
Skinceuticals Gentle Cream Cleanser
Skinceuticals LHA Cleansing Gel
Toning -an often-overlooked step but necessary for product penetration, hydration, and removing excess sebum from the skin’s surface. Oily/Acneic skin will benefit from a wipe-on toner with degreasing ingredients such as salicylic acid. This will effectively remove excess sebum and dead skin cells allowing active ingredients to penetrate more effectively. For normal to dry skin conditions a hydrating toner with active ingredients like hyaluronic and lactic acids will increase product penetration and improve barrier function.
Skinceuticals Conditioning Toner
Exfoliation-we believe gentle resurfacing in the form of chemical, physical, or enzymatic exfoliation should be a part of your everyday skincare routine but only if your skin is not compromised. Exfoliating a compromised skin will lead to further irritation causing the skin to age faster. We often remind patients that their skin is telling a story; red and irritated equates to angry and reactive! Use common sense, exfoliating removes surface skin cells and if your skin is irritated or inflamed the last thing it wants to be is exfoliated.
Moisturizing/Hydrating-all skin, regardless of skin type, needs hydration. Facial cleansing removes structural lipids from the skins surface. Those lipids are extremely important as they help to comprise the skins NMF’s (natural-moisturizing-factors). The molecular weight of oil (lipids) is a crucial determining factor in deciding which moisturizer is best for your skin. Heavier weight oils are going to create more occlusion making them a terrific option for drier skin while lower weight oils provide more breathability and are best suited for oily/combination skin. In truly acneic skin, an oil free hydrator that contains hyaluronic acid is a great option to help keep the skin moist while negating the drying effects of topical ingredients.
Skinceuticals A.G.E Interrupter
Skinceuticals Triple Lipid Repair
Protection-all skin, regardless of the color, needs daily SPF protection. All the hype you’ve heard about darker complexions not needing sunscreen is absolutely false. Darker skin has more built in protection in the form of melanin but that doesn’t mean it’s safe from skin cancer, sunburns, or free radical formation that happens in response to UV light. If you only do one of the aforementioned steps daily, this is the one to do. 80-99% of visible aging is caused from UV exposure so unless you want Father Time marching right across your face, use a full-spectrum SPF daily!
Skinceuticals Physical Fusion Matte UV Defense
Elta MD UV Elements SPF 44 Tinted
Elta MD UV Clear SPF 46 Tinted and Untinted
Shop all these products by clicking their links in this post or on our shop here!
Want a customized skincare routine? Not sure where to start? Book a skin consultation with our Aesthetician! Call us at 415.409.6500 or book online!
To learn more, contact our San Francisco office and call us at 415.409.6500.