Good Night Time Skin Care Habits

 Is your skin suffering from your night time skin routine?

If you roll into bed without taking a few simple steps to care for your skin, then your skin is suffering. It certainly is not benefiting from all the hours you sleep.

Dermatologists and skin care professionals break your ‘skin care day’ into two parts: morning and night. That gives products and skin biology approximately 12 hours to ‘work’ to support your best complexion.

In that 24-hour period, bedtime is the best time to focus on therapeutic products that fix skin problems and keep skin healthy. When you are asleep, you can focus your skin care on what your skin needs instead of how you need your skin to look.

What are the best bedtime skin care habits for healthy skin?

1. Wash your face before bed. It’s important. Pick a cleanser compatible to your skin type and that will remove makeup, sunscreen, and the day’s dirt and oil. Bedtime facial cleansing will help prevent clogged pores. It is also a good way to prevent dead skin build-up that causes lusterless skin tone.
2. Apply night treatment products. Use these hours to let therapeutic products work through the night to improve complexion problems like acne, wrinkles, uneven skin pigment, and rashes like Rosacea etc.
3. Maintain proper skin hydration by applying a moisturizer. Pick a moisturizer compatible to your skin type (read more about picking a facial moisturizer here and a body moisturizer here). Your skin moisture level helps to maintain your skin barrier strength. This, in turn, helps to protect your skin from environmental stressors like dryness, irritation, redness, and chapping. This all depends on your skin hydration. Moisturizers are important, and bedtime is a great time to quench your skin’s thirst.

What are the two most common mistakes people make in their night time skin care?

1. Not washing their faces before bed to remove the day’s dirt, oil, and skin care products.
2. Not moisturizing all freshly cleansed skin. Moisturizers always work best when applied within 3 minutes after getting out of the bath or shower and toweling skin dry. Apply moisturizer at bedtime, and let it sink in to create healthy and attractive skin during the day too.

What are some of the most popular night time skin care routines?

Acne: Use the cleanse and correct products in the Ultimate Acne Treatment Kit followed by the Daily Moisturizing Face Cream for Oily to Normal Skin. Wrinkles and Aging Skin Concerns: Cleanse with your favorite skin cleanser. Try my good all-purpose cleanser, Natural Bar Soap. Apply Retinol Anti-Wrinkle Night Cream or Glycolic Acid Anti-Wrinkle Face Cream. Rosacea: Cleanse skin with the Calming Zinc Bar Soap and apply Green Tea Antioxidant Skin Therapy, followed by Daily Moisturizing Face Cream for Normal to Dry Skin or Oily to Normal Skin. Dry Skin: Cleanse with a dry skin cleanser (Extremely Gentle Foaming Cleanser for the face, and the Natural Bar Soap for general skin cleansing). Apply the All Natural Face and Body Butter for general skin hydration. For the face, you could also choose my Daily Moisturizing Face Cream for Normal to Dry Skin.

 What role does sleep play in keeping skin healthy and attractive?

Scientists actually studied this question. Getting a good night’s sleep is really important to how you look the next day. 'Burn the midnight oil' and you will look like you did. If you want a good appearance the next day, get a good night of sleep. In my post, Is Your Face Really More Attractive After a Good Night's Sleep, I wrote:

Researchers found when you don’t gift yourself with a good night’s sleep, you can expect to wake up with:

• Hanging eyelids
• Red eyes (more than any usual redness)
• Swollen eyes (more than any typical swelling)
• Dark circles under the eyes
• Paler skin
• Increased wrinkles/fine lines
• Additional droopy corners around the mouth

Beauty rest really is exactly that!