Keeping Your Skin Brighter And Beautiful
Looking over photos of yourself throughout the years, you might notice something new about your skin. Not only might you have a couple signs of aging that you would rather you didn’t, but your skin’s tone and color may have shifted over time. This can happen naturally, as we age, but there is also a lot of discoloration that we could better protect ourselves from by taking better care of our skin. Here are a few ways to do just that.
Exfoliate safely
Exfoliating your skin at the end of the day is a good way to get rid of the gunk that can build up in your pores and stop the buildup of grease and dirt that causes blemishes to pop up. However, you should exfoliate naturally whenever you have the chance and avoid over-exfoliation where possible. When skin is exfoliated too much with things like chemical peels and facial scrubs, it may cause increased pigmentation for some people. This is known as post-inflammatory hyper-pigmentation and, while not everyone is at too much of a risk of it, if you have trouble with hyper-pigmentation in general, you should be aware of this.
Don’t underestimate the sun
When it comes to your skin, keeping it youthful, beautiful, healthy, and even, you should always be aware of just what the sun can do to it. Of course, many people are quite happy to utilize the sun’s ability to change our skin, taking whatever opportunity we can to tan. However, excessive exposure can cause long-term changes to skin tone beyond what’s intended. This is because it can suck the moisture out of the skin and reduce the nutritional value beneath the surface. With that dryness, comes the redness, itchiness, and flakiness. The sun ages your skin, which can also cause sunspots to occur. If you’re going to tan, do it responsibly, and make sure that you wear UV protection every day, covering every bit of your skin that’s exposed to sunlight.
Clean the slate
Even if you do exfoliate on a regular basis, the upper layer of your skin is going to be, in part, comprised of dead skin cells. Getting rid of them and cleaning the upper layer of your skin can reveal a smoother, lighter, more evenly toned layer beneath, which is what dermaplaning is all about. How long does dermaplaning last? It takes away about three weeks’ worth of dead skin cells. As such, the healthier, glowing skin beneath lasts up to about 4 weeks. Since your skin constantly grows, that new layer of skin is going to eventually age and become a new layer of dead skin cells yet again. However, you can arrange another dermaplaning to make sure that you’re always showing your healthiest, most beautiful skin.
Tackle those blotchy patches
If you have red, blotchy, irritable patches of skin, then the best way to tackle them is to visit your dermatologist as soon as possible. You might think that it’s simply dry skin and do what you can to hydrate it, but the truth is that there are many causes of facial redness. Some of them include chronic skin conditions like eczema and psoriasis, which is very difficult to treat on your own. Hormonal imbalances can often be behind these new patches of blotchy red skin, as well, from changes to the skin after a pregnancy to the use of birth control pills. Some of them can be waited out while your hormones re-balance, but prescription medicine could help you get it in check, as well.
Avoid overloading your skin with chemicals
All the products that we believe are entirely good for us might not necessarily be as good as we think. When possible, it’s always wise to rely on natural healthy and beauty products with ingredient lists that we can understand. Brands often use terms like “parfum” and “fragrance” to hide certain ingredients that might actually end up dehydrating or sucking the nutrients from the skin, which can lead to hyper-pigmentation. If you’re using a skin lightener, one ingredient to aim for is magnesium ascorbyl phosphate. While this might be a mouthful, it’s just a name for a type of vitamin C that suppresses melanin production.
From hyper-pigmentation to excessive dryness to too much exposure to UV rays, there are a lot of ways to shift the tone and color of our skin without meaning to. Hopefully, the tips here show you how to combat it and how to keep a little more control over the appearance of your skin.