How To Get All Over Great Skin For Your Body
Don’t ignore your body! Adopt an adequate skincare routine for more than just your face. Take three steps toward perfect skin all over your body.
Taking care of your skin means more than just taking care of the skin on your face. Your body’s skin needs care as well. Fortunately, taking care of your body’s skin is much less labor intensive than taking care of the skin on your face. Incorporate these three practices into your daily routine and you’ll have beautiful skin all over in no time at all.
1) Moisturize every day. Applying a moisturizer is something that most people do only sporadically, but really it is something that everyone, men and women, should turn into a daily routine. Dry skin lacks that healthy glow that properly moisturized skin has but dry skin doesn’t just look bad, it feels bad too. Dry skin is flaky but it is also itchy and uncomfortable. Repeated scratching can break the skin which is then itchy and sore. Breaking the skin can also lead to an infection when harmful bacteria enter your body through the now-broken protection that your skin normally provides.
If you have trouble remembering to moisturize everyday, try making it a part of your bathing routine. As soon as you leave the shower or bathtub, when skin is still damp, slather on a moisturizer made for all over body use. The layer of moisturizer will trap in the water that is sitting on your skin from the shower and it introduces to the skin the moisture contained in the product itself.
2) Speaking of shower routines, if you have dry skin and are using a bar of soap when you shower, throw that bar away and get a better replacement. Soap is drying to the skin so replace that bar with a thick, moisturizing cream cleanser.
But problem skin doesn’t begin and end with dryness. If you have all-over oily skin, a soap or a gel cleanser, rather than a cream cleanser, would work best for you. If your body is prone to experiencing acne, try using a cleanser specifically formulated to treat body acne. Using a cleanser that works for, not against, your body’s skin type is a key component in all-over skin care.
3) While you are out shopping for new moisturizers and cleansers, don’t forget to pick up a bath- or shower-time exfoliator. Exfoliators help keep the rough skin around your elbows and knees smooth, but they are important for other reasons as well. If you don’t exfoliate before you moisturize, then you are working against your moisturizer. Your skin will take to the moisturizer much better if you first slough off the dead skin cells on the skin’s surface that block moisturizers from getting to the new skin underneath.
Exfoliating is also very important for acne-prone body skin. Keeping your body well exfoliated keeps dead skin cells from building up and trapping bacteria in your body’s pores. Because most people’s body skin is much thicker than the skin on their faces, using a coarse exfoliant such as a sugar scrub is ideal. But for acne prone skin, a gentler exfoliator won’t irritate the skin the way a coarse-grained product would.
Written by Angela McKendree – 2002 Pagewise
