How To Develop An effective Skin Care Routine

Serums! Toners! Moisturizers! Masks! There are many different types of skin-care products and each one has a unique role to play in your skin-care routine. This quick guide will help you understand what every product does and how to integrate it into your morning and evening regimen.

What is the purpose of different skin-care products?

Different product types have different benefits for your skin:

• Cleansers remove makeup, pollution and excess oil and refresh your skin for the next step. If you wear a lot of makeup each day, you may want to use a makeup remover first, then a cleanser.
• Exfoliants scrub or dissolve dead skin cells and any other buildup on the skin.
• Toners balance your skin, give an extra shot of nutrients and help other products to absorb better.
• Serums offer a powerful dose of nutrition to your skin. They may moisturize, soothe, protect the skin against environmental aggressors and help the skin repair itself.
• Moisturizers lock in moisture and protect the skin barrier.
• Eye creams moisturize the delicate eye area and typically reduce puffiness and dark circles.
• Masks have benefits that vary depending on the ingredients, but they tend to act as treatments that prevent dryness, eliminate excess oil and/or soothe the skin.
• Sunscreens protect the skin against sun damage.

 

How often should you complete each step?

Generally speaking, you want to do every step of your skin-care routine in the morning and at night. But there are a few exceptions:

• Exfoliant: Exfoliate your skin two or three times per week.
• Serum with active ingredients: Back To Earth Skin’s Glow Facial Serum is safe to use morning and night. But if you’re using another serum that contains an aggressive active ingredient like retinol, you may want to only apply it at night a few times a week.
• Mask: Use a mask a couple of times a week as a treatment. There’s no need to mask every day. 

What order should you do your skin-care steps?

If you were completing every single step of your skin-care routine one evening, you would perform the steps in this order:

• Cleanse
• Exfoliate
• Mask (and remove the mask after about 10 to 15 minutes, but read the directions)
• Tone
• Apply your serum, eye cream and moisturizer—in that order

In the morning, you would finish off with sunscreen before applying your makeup.

Do you need to let a product absorb before applying the next one?

There’s no need to wait after you cleanse, exfoliate and tone. It’s a smart idea to let your serum, eye cream, moisturizer and sunscreen dry before moving on to the next step in your routine. That might take 30 seconds to a minute.

Do you need to use all of these products to have healthy skin?

If you’re just starting out on your skin-care journey, make sure you at least use a cleanser and a moisturizer every single night and apply an SPF in the morning. That’s the bare minimum.