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Skinacea's Four Golden Rules
Rule No. 1: Less is More
So why “less is more”? The idea is to use the simplest products for your skin whenever possible. Most of the time, people use all sorts of things to try to make their skin look better, only to make things worse in the long run. Using too many products or using products that are too harsh can sometimes cause irritation that wouldn’t be there if you had just stuck to the simple stuff in the beginning. A good example of this is a vitamin C skin care product.
I have an aunt; we call her Aunt Greg. She is a striking woman, absolutely obsessed with having a porcelain skin tone. She sees all these commercials advertising vitamin C as an antioxidant and skin brightener and one of her close friends even uses vitamin C with great results. This is enough to convince my Aunt Greg to run out the next morning and purchase a C serum. She ends up trying to use this supposedly amazing product for two months, only to turn red and itchy from it. No skin brightening at all! So what’s the moral of the story? LESS IS MORE.
It’s okay to use different products and experiment with different things but when you use too much or keep trying to use something that just doesn't agree with your skin, sometimes you can really put your skin into overdrive and make things worse than you expected.
Besides my Aunt Greg, I am the perfect example of putting my skin through much more than it needed. In the heyday of my skin's nastiness, I continually chose to use oil-free foaming cleansers because I thought those were the only kinds of cleansers that would clean well, not leave any residue behind, and not break me out. With very acne-prone, zitty skin, I thought I needed some good cleaning!
However, even the gentlest foaming cleansers dried out my skin and made it worse. After I switched to a oil-based cleansing balm, my skin stopped breaking out in new pimples everyday and actually started to look healthy! So, less really is more. No wonder there are people who clear up their skin once they stop doing everything to it...
Often you’ll find that when you’re in a skin rut, laying off of all the different treatments and sticking to a no-frills moisturizer and gentle cleanser will help your skin bounce right back. Onto rule numero dos!
Next » Skinacea's Rule No. 2