Skincare Tips for Acne Prone Skin

Acne prone skin can be very difficult to deal with, particularly when so much information seems conflicting about how to handle it. Between doing your makeup, then your skincare routine, there are a lot of opportunities to make breakouts worse, not better. I’ve already pointed out some makeup tips for acne prone skin, but what about with skincare? Preventing breakouts is the best option, but often we’re stuck with breakouts that we may be irritating further. Come check out these skincare tips for acne prone skin.

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Don’t over-exfoliate (and try to avoid physical exfoliants).

When you’re dealing with breakouts, your skin is already stressed and prone to further breakouts or damage. While exfoliation can help lift the top layer of dead skin cells and allow treatments to penetrate, your skin needs time to recover. Not giving your skin that recovery period, about a week depending on what you use, can do more harm than good.

Also, consider not using physical exfoliants during particularly bad breakouts or with broken skin. These can cause microtears in the skin, which allows for the spread of bacteria, and cause further breakouts.

Minimize your routine.

If you have more than just a cleanser, toner/treatment, and a moisturizer, there’s a chance that you’re overwhelming your skin. When you throw so much at your skin, possibly with ingredients that counteract each other, the benefits can be lost. If you’re having an intense breakout, try and limit what goes on your skin to prevent irritation or congestion. Especially if you use multiple serums or several chemical treatments.

It can be very tempting to throw everything you have at your skin. But once it hits max capacity, it won’t be able to take on everything you put on it effectively. Using numerous, possibly contradictory, steps can make it difficult to know what may be agitating your skin, as well.

Moisturizers are your best friend.

Oily skin and acne often go hand in hand, and there’s a general concern of using moisturizers on already oily skin. However, using a moisturizer if you’re acne prone can actually help your skin heal more efficiently, and potentially limit breakouts in the future.

Providing your skin with the moisture it “knows” it isn’t getting can, over time, help reduce sebum production. Lower sebum production means less oil in pores and ultimately fewer breakouts. It’s also important as breakouts can become very dry and irritated, and the added moisture allows for the skin to heal better and absorb treatments more easily.

So is sun protection.

It’s hard to avoid the sun if you leave your home at all, and as UV rays can damage the skin, it can also irritate breakouts. That means that your skin isn’t just trying to heal from acne, but also from UV damage. Using a sunscreen will help limit that damage and allow your skin to heal better.

Going with the previous tip, finding a moisturizer and sunscreen combo is an effective option to limit two steps into one.

Avoid alcohol (the ethyl kind).

if you ever go into the drugstore and check the ingredient list on acne focused skincare, you’re probably going to find some form of alcohol higher on the list. Remember, the higher something is on the ingredient list, the higher concentration.

Alcohol dries the skin horribly, and for those with breakouts that does nothing but irritate them further. It can lead to flaking, irritation, and possibly scabbing should the breakout pop as they often do naturally. Look for gentler skincare products, without alcohol, to treat acne prone skin.

Be aware of broken skin.

I mentioned this earlier, but broken skin is any skin that has somehow lost its protective layer. You see this a lot when acne pops, generally when someone pops it themselves, or in the healing of cystic acne. The skin will scab as the body tries to repair the damage done by the bacteria.

Broken skin is the most vulnerable skin, as its a direct line from the outside of the body to the inside. Things can go septic, infections can start, there’s just a whole mess of things that can happen at this point. It’s also one way your skin develops acne scars. It’s critical that should you find any broken skin, that you focus on treating it first and foremost.

Skip the harsh treatments, don’t exfoliate, and focus on soothing and hydrating. If you continue to stress those broken areas, it will take them double the time to heal and it will not heal in the best way possible. Worse, if you continue to break the skin, bacteria will spread further.

Oils are not the enemy.

In a similar vein to moisturizers, oils seem to be one of those things that people with oily skin avoid, when it’s something they should consider using in their routine. Moisturizers are wonderful as they retain moisture for the skin, but oils are a little more high powered, and can deliver more moisturization coupled with effective soothing treatments

An excellent oil to consider is one with blue tansy, as it is very soothing and helps calm redness and irritation. The vitamins found in certain oils promote overall skin health and healing, and can be very beneficial in treating acne and excess oil production. I tend to recommend using an oil at night, as it gives the skin time to absorb it when your skin is doing most of its healing. It could be the boost your moisturizing step needs.

What are some ways you help your skin when you’re having breakouts?

7 Makeup Tips for Acne Prone Skin

When thinking of skincare, our makeup products don’t usually land on the radar. It’s so easy to forget that the makeup we wear affects our skin very directly. And when you have acne or certain skin conditions, it’s best to be extra careful of what makeup you use and how you use it. Sometimes, your routine can make such conditions worse, especially when you wear makeup to cover it. And it doesn’t help when most makeup tips for acne prone skin only make the situation worse.

However, there are actually quite a few things you can do to make an acne focused makeup routine more effective. Most are quite easy, and a couple require just a little tweaking to your individual needs. Here are 7 makeup tips for acne prone skin.

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