Skin Care Articles

Doctors advocate using the same skin care routine everyday. These routines don't need to be fancy or costly, and can be used unaided or in conjunction with a more serious skin care treatment.

Choosing The Best Treatments for you

Everyone has a different skin type, so the standard routine needs to be adjusted to work best with your skin. Skin can change from a wide variety of factors such as weather, diet, and age. In particular, the skin tends to be oilier in the warm months and drier in the cold months. Menopause can bring about a change from oily or normal to dry skin. Conversely, a shift from a low-fat diet to one rich in certain fats (particularly essential fatty acids) can turn dry skin to normal. Skin color can change the degree to which you need UV protection. While the sun damages any skin, the damage is minimal in dark-skinned people. Conversely, fair skinned people need to be more particular about sun protection, i.e. minimizing sun exposure, choosing an the right sunscreen and applying it the correct way.

Common Programs

A typical skin care routine would include the following steps: washing/cleansing, toning (optional depending on skin type), moisturizing and sun protection.

For most people, carrying out the routine twice a day is optimal. Some people with dry and/or sensitive skin may do better with once a day washing/cleansing but moisturizing 2 or more times a day. Most experts agree that the regimen should incorporate exfoliation, but not in excess. Exfoliation once or twice a week is usually sufficient. People with fast natural epidermal turnover may need less or none at all.

One of the most important parts of the regimen can be preservation from the sun, sunscreen should be applied as the last step anytime there will be exposure to the sun. It is always best to use a product made for protection from UV rays, however some people like to use cosmetics that contain sunscreen to save time.

Advanced Cures

For maximum skin care results, the basic routine is usually insufficient, especially for people over thirty. Adding a well-selected product or 2 with wisely chosen, scientifically proven active ingredients can further improve your results. However, the results from advanced skin care treatments partly depend on whether you properly integrate them with your basic routine. In particular, if you apply products to skin that has not been cleansed, the effectiveness of active ingredients is reduced. If you use the regimen then apply advanced products, the penetration of active ingredients may still be reduced because the moisturizer has occluded some the entryways.

A good time to use secondary products is soon after you washed/cleansed, rinsed and slightly patted your skin with a towel, when the skin is clean, warm and still slightly moist. Since many of the active treatments have moisturizers, you can usually skip a separate moisturizer whenever you apply such a product. If you think you need additional moisturizing, wait a few minutes for the active product to absorb, and then apply any moisturizer over it.