Are You Guilty Of These Skincare Sins?

We all want healthy, glowing, youthful and beautiful skin. It’s not too much to ask, is it? But in our zeal to get back the gorgeous skin from our youth, many of us can fall into bad habits. Habits that can not only see us spend a fortune on products that are either wrong for us or just expensive snake oil. Habits that, while well-meaning can even wind up doing us more harm than good. The truth is that having beautiful skin needn’t be arduous nor expensive. It doesn’t have to take up hour after hour of our day, nor does it have to eat into our carefully planned finances. In skincare, as in most things, a little self-education goes a long way.

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The more you know about your skin (including your skin type), the less likely you are to commit cardinal sins which, at best could waste your time and money, but at worse can do real and lasting damage to your skin.

Washing too much

Clean skin is beautiful and healthy skin, right? Well, kinda. While it’s certainly important for us to wash our skin, many of us can overdo it. When we wash our skin too much, scrub too vigorously or use scalding hot water, we may think that we’re doing our skin good. But honey, that “pain is beauty” thing is a myth! Over washing can dry out our skin’s natural oils and make it appear older, drier and less lustrous. When and how often you should wash your face depends on your skin type but by rule of thumb, oily skin should be washed in the mornings and evenings (or after working out) while dry skin should be washed once a day in the evening at most.

Overspending

With Christmas just around the corner, we’re all thinking extra hard about our seasonal spending. But if your bathroom cabinet is lined with skincare products, yet you’re considering getting another credit card to pay for the kids’ Christmas presents, you may have fallen into the trap of overspending on your skincare.

While every girl deserves to treat herself, she can also save herself a fortune by making her own skincare products (seriously, you’d be astonished what you can make yourself) and knowing the good products from the wastes of money. Which brings us to…

Failing to read up on the ingredients

There are lots of active ingredients which sound impressive and scientific, but when we dig a little deeper, we find out that these ingredients aren’t quite as beneficial as they first seemed. Their effects can be exaggerated or downright spurious. The brands worth your time will furnish you with the information you need to make an informed decision. Case in point: check out this Avon info about Hyaluronic Acid. Brands not worth your time will try to bamboozle you with impressive sounding ingredients that a little research demonstrates will not benefit your skin. For example, collagen and elastin are absolutely important, but they can’t be absorbed into the skin, your body has to make its own.

Expecting our products to do all the work

We all love our skincare products, and used properly they really can work wonders. But we can’t expect them to do all the heavy lifting for us. If we don’t drink enough water, pound booze, smoke like a chimney, party long into the night and gorge on fast food, processed snacks and sodas we can’t possibly expect any product on the market to be able to undo all the damage our lifestyles do to our skin.

If you expect your products to do all the work for you, you’ll always be disappointed. Make sure that you get plenty of sleep, drink lots of water (most of us really aren’t drinking anywhere near enough), get at least 8 hours of sleep every night (while your asleep your body gets hard at work repairing damaged cells, including skin cells), and eat a healthy diet packed with these skin healthy foods.

Neglecting suncare on cold days

In the colder months, we may think that the damage to our skin caused by the sun is mitigated by the lack of heat. But this is not the case at all. The sun can do just as much damage to our skin on cold days as it can in the heat. Just because you can’t feel the sun’s rays doesn’t mean that they aren’t harmful to your skin.

With this in mind, be sure to wear winter sun care on your skin when you’ll be spending a lot of time outdoors.

The more you know, the easier it is to avoid committing cardinal skincare sins.