Essentials for Skin, Part I: The Basics

I love skin care products. You could say I am a skincare ( & make-up!) junkie. I am a sucker for good packaging and marketing, I love to try new things, but I get most excited over finding something that actually works. I'm like a kid in a candy store whenever I set foot in my absolutely favorite store, Sephora. I can't set foot in there too often, though, or breathe and I would be living out a cardboard box!

I am often asked what the best products are out there- and there sure are a lot of them- "What works?" they ask. People want to know what they should be using on their skin, and I guess they ask me because 1) I am a licensed esthetician and 2) they know I live for this stuff!

Before I get into what I consider to be the best products out there, I want to first stress a very important point. And that is, that the question you should be asking is not "What works?", but rather, "What will work for me?" What works for someone else's skin is not necessarily what's going to work for you. Everyone's skin is different, and has unique needs. This is what makes life interesting! I know, its not as fun to chat with your friends about skincare when you have this bit of wisdom floating in your head. It's tempting, as you admire a friend's glowing, even-toned complexion, to ask "What have you been using?". Now, if you're a guy reading this, you might be thinking, "I'd rather die than ask another guy what he uses on his skin". That's understandable, and if that's you, you might want to just skip over this paragraph. But if you're a girl, this scenario plays out quite often. Your friend leans over and confesses her latest magic potion in a lowered voice. (Or, maddeningly, she may just answer, "Oh! I've just been drinking a lot more water".) At this point you're poised to go right out the next day to hunt down that very same product so that hopefully, your skin can be glowy and even-toned too. So you buy it, try it, and more often than not discover that this magic potion just doesn't do the trick on your skin. And that's okay, because remember, we're all different.

It's a much smarter approach to first know your own skin prior to purchasing anything. You can find that out by a quick quiz, a home-administered test, or by simple observation It also helps to know a bit about what basic products you should be looking for.

That being said, its easy to conclude that we all want the same thing: clear, soft, dewy, even-toned, firm skin. It'd be nice if it were also relatively wrinkle-free. In short, it'd be great if we could stop time, as in that freaky Twilight Zone episode when the guy discovers the stopwatch that can actually freeze time while he can move about. Wait, did he continue aging normally while everyone else was frozen? Okay, maybe that's a bad analogy.

So what is actually needed to achieve this? Well, lets keep it simple and start with the basics. There are four things you should be doing to your skin everyday: you need to cleanse your skin, moisturize it, treat it, and protect it. There is also one more thing that should be done on a regular basis, although not necessarily every day: exfoliate. So there it is; the nitty gritty. [hey Ranny, that rhymes with titty!- (don't ask.)] That's 5 separate actions that your skin care arsenal needs to accomplish effectively. Don't panic: I'll break it down for you. And it may not even involve that many different products (unless you're product-compulsive like me). But I'm tired now, this blog-thing is a lot of hard work. I'm off to bed, and will publish Part Deux in the near future. Nite-nite!