because it is so important. Once you know your skin type, you will have a clearer understanding of which product formulations and textures work best for you. If you have oily skin, you’ll want to avoid overly emollient or greasy formulations at all costs. Conversely, if you have dry skin, you’ll want formulations with a creamy, rich base. This is incredibly important to understand. So, while all skin types need antioxidants, skin-repairing ingredients, and cell-communicating ingredients, the texture of the products that contain those ingredients is determined by your skin type. It’s fine to layer multiple products with the same texture in your routine, or, if you prefer, and if it’s appropriate for your skin type, you can layer lighter-weight products under heavier, more emollient products.
What Influences Skin Type
Many people have no idea what their skin type is, which is completely understandable because skin type can be hard to pin down and because it can be a moving target. That’s because almost anything can influence skin type—both external and internal elements can and do influence the way your skin looks and feels.Things that affect your skin type that are generally beyond your control are:
Hormones
Skin disorders
Genetic predisposition
Medications (oral or topical)
Exposure to pollution
Climate (including seasonal changes)
Things that affect your skin type that you have some control over are:
Diet
Your skincare routine (using irritating products or products that are wrong for your skin type)
Stress
Unprotected/prolonged sun exposure or use of tanning beds
You May be Causing a Skin Type or Concern
It probably isn’t difficult to see how smoking, sun damage, diet, and genetics can negatively and dangerously affect your skin type and concerns. What many people don’t realize is that the skincare products they use can also be a primary factor in exacerbating, or even creating, the very skin issues you are trying to resolve. In other words, what you do to your skin via your skincare routine may be causing or intensifying a skin type or skin concern you don’t want!
You’ll never know your actual skin type or get your skin concerns under control if you use products that contain ingredients that create the very problems you don’t want.
If you’re using products that contain irritants, you can create dry skin and still make your oily skin worse (think dry skin on top, oily underneath). Products with irritating ingredients also cause collagen and elastin to break down, damage skin’s ability to heal, and make wrinkles worse. Alternatively, if you use overly-emollient or thick-textured products along with a drying cleanser, you can clog pores, prevent skin cells from exfoliating (which makes your skin look dull), and make your skin feel oily in some areas and dry in others. If you over-scrub, you can damage the barrier (surface), causing more wrinkles and dry skin.
Not surprisingly, the kinds of products you use make all the difference in the world when trying to reach your goal of having the best skin of your life now.
How to Determine Your Skin Type
Once you’ve ruled out the controllable factors that can affect your skin type (for example, sun exposure, smoking) and eliminated problematic products (poor formulations, jar packaging, irritating ingredients) from your routine, you’ll be able to more accurately determine your skin type.
A good thing to keep in mind is that almost everyone at some time or another has combination skin. That’s because the center area of your face naturally has more oil glands, so you are more likely to be oily or have clogged pores in the “T-zone.” Many people with dry skin often find their skin is less dry on the nose and center of the forehead than elsewhere. It’s also typical for some areas of your face (the eye area, around the nose) to be more sensitive.
Before you get out your mirror and have a close look, it’s best to wash your face with a gentle cleanser. Then, wait two hours to see what your skin does without additional products or makeup (you can apply a gentle toner after cleansing, if desired). You may see a combination of skin types—normal to dry in some areas, oily in others. It bears repeating that anyone’s skin can have multiple “types,” and that these types can change due to hormonal cycles, seasons, stress levels, and other factors.
How to Determine Your Skin Concern(s)
In some ways this is the easiest section of the book because most of us are painfully aware of what our skin concerns happen to be. Most of us already know what wrinkles, breakouts, blackheads, sagging skin, or brown discolorations look like. That’s the easy part. But there are some skin concerns that are far more difficult to identify, such as sebaceous hyperplasia (small whitish, crater-like bumps on skin), milia (small pearl-like bumps on skin), keratosis pilaris (tiny red rough bumps on the arms and legs), and rosacea (sensitive skin with flushing and redness) among others. We explain all of these in the next sections of the book.
The most important takeaway about skin concerns is that most people have multiple skin concerns at the same time. It is not unusual for someone to have rosacea, wrinkles, sun damage, brown discolorations, and patches of dryness. This is where skincare can get complicated because once you’ve identified your skin concerns, then you need to add the specialty treatment products that can address them. Your core skincare routine may be enough to handle some aspects of your skin concerns, but that all depends on how stubborn or deep the problems are. You are the only who can determine how targeted and precise a skincare routine you want and need.
There are specific treatment products, both prescription and non-prescription, targeted for the treatment of acne, rosacea or other types of redness, blackheads, very oily skin, advanced sun damage, wrinkles, eczema, hydration, skin discolorations, and so on. Those concerns, along with your basic skincare requirements, are explained in the following chapters—along with helpful tips on how to put a routine together, including the order of application.
Basic Skincare Requirements
This section presents a quick overview of the products you need to build a core or basic skincare routine. (We elaborate more on this topic in Chapter 4, Which Skincare Products You Need and Which Ones to Avoid.) In the following paragraphs, we list the products you would use every day to maintain your skin, to meet many of your skincare needs related to your skin type, and to address some of your skin concerns. Though this may sound like a sweeping comment, we believe strongly that everyone can benefit from following these steps, even teenagers. Although we know it’s highly unlikely that any teenager will follow all these steps, starting them in the right direction with at least three would be a perfect beginning.
The basics are: Twice a day use a gentle water-soluble cleanser appropriate for your skin type; more emollient for dry skin, more of a lotion style for normal skin, and a gel or pearlized lotion with a bit of sudsing for oily/combination skin. You can start or follow with a makeup remover to be sure you’ve removed every last bit of makeup; you don’t ever want to fall asleep in your makeup.
Next is a toner, and of course it must be one that contains no irritants of any kind. This step assures you that you are quickly giving back to skin the crucial substances we mentioned before, such as antioxidants, skin-repairing ingredients, and cell-communicating ingredients, in a lightweight sheer formula that’s appropriate for your skin type; dry skin would
