January is a time for fresh starts, and for many people they’ll have entered the new year determined to take a bit better care of themselves. If you’re building a skincare regime for the first time, you might quickly find yourself confused and overwhelmed. Fortunately, we’re here to provide a little bit of advice for beginners.
Starting Well
The first thing you need to do is make a good start – repairing years of neglect isn’t easy, and you can give yourself the best possible start to your new regime by handing yourself over to the experts. Book in for some detoxifying, moisturising facials at a beauty location like the Skinsmiths Skin Clinic, Clapham and they’ll leave you looking and feeling your best, so all you have to do is maintain that great condition rather than build up to it yourself.
Cleansing
Life in the modern world, especially a city, bombards your skin with stressors: hot and cold weather; pollutants; stress; exhaustion; dehydration, all these factors combine to create an assault on your face that can leave your skin dry, reddened and experiencing flare-ups of acne!
If you want to avoid this, step one needs to be regular cleansing: before you apply any other products, and especially cosmetics you need to ensure you’ve removed any particles of dirt or pollution to avoid ‘sealing them in’. Using micellar water at night is a great shortcut to a quick cleanse, as the tiny ‘micellars’ or oil molecules suspended in the water lift foreign matter off your skin quickly and painlessly.
A morning cleanse can be more intense – a clay-based cleanse leaves you alert and ready to begin the rest of your morning routine.
Exfoliating
You don’t need to, and indeed shouldn’t do this every day, but depending on your skin type you should be doing a deeper, more active exfoliation between one and three times a week. This doesn’t just clean your skin, it removes dry and dead skin and excess oil as well as helping to prevent blocked pores.
This gives you a ‘blank canvas’ that you can work on, either with cosmetics or simply other treatments to build the kind of effect you really want…
Moisturiser
The most important thing you can do is moisturise! All of those stressors we listed earlier dry your skin, either directly as a side effect of the irritation they cause! Restore your skin by moisturising: keep a day moisturiser with you so can top up through the day, and ensure some deep rejuvenation with a night cream.
It can be tempting to over-moisturise if this is all novel, but try to stick to the instructions! Too much moisturiser can cause extra oil and blocked pores – two of the very same problems you’re trying to solve!
Sticking to this simple, basic regime will see results in a short time and is easy to keep up past the usual breaking point of new year’s resolutions.
