My skin is important to me, and these days it feels like I spend a lot of time just trying to keep it bright, and age as gracefully as possible. Although I feel like I have a fairly good grasp on what works with my skin and what doesn’t, a few months ago I made a mistake that made my skin turn for the worse.
You may remember in the fall, I talked about how to change up your skincare routine for the cooler dryer air. I followed my own advice and upped the moisture, and went down on the cleansing. However, life started to get hectic and busy, and I started to slack on my routine. I wasn’t moisturizing my skin like I should, and was taking shortcuts with cleansing (like using body wash on my face) My skin first became dry, then turned incredibly oily – and I was getting pimples left and right. I’ve never really had oily skin, so this was brand new to me. I honestly thought maybe it was just stress causing a change in my skin.
My Skin Turned Oily – Because of Dry Skin
My skin was so visibly oily, my makeup would turn shiny and look runny by mid-day. Needless to say I got a little desperate to make it go away. I started to look for solutions to this new skincare issue of mine and turned to drying lotions and an acne cleanser…which I later found was the worst thing I could have done for my skin.
Don’t get me wrong, those acne cleansers are great, when it’s what your skin needs – in my case they weren’t what I needed. After a month of so of using the acne products, and my skin getting worse, I started to do a little research. What I found is that sometimes the cause of oily skin is overly dry skin. When your skin gets to a certain level of dryness, it will overproduce oils for protection. Those acne products I was using were just continuing to dry my skin out, and do the opposite of what I needed. What I needed was to put moisture back into my skin!
How I Helped my Overly Dry Skin
When you’re skin goes haywire, you’ll try anything. I decided it was worth a shot to see if dryness was the culprit, and stopped the acne cleansers all together. I first made my routine as simple as possible, to help my skin calm down after all of the experimenting I was doing with it. In the evening I removed my makeup with a micellar cleanser and didn’t put anything else on my face. I just let the oils from the micellar sink into my skin.
In the morning, I went back to using the Total Facial Cleansing Gel from Skin Resource.MD, followed by Visibly Moist Toner, and Biolipid Cream. After a couple of weeks, my skin started to improve so I added in Hyaluronic Moisture Boost Serum in the morning, and Baobab Skin Correction cream in the evening for even more moisture. After I felt like my skin fully bounced back, I started using all of the products morning and night.
I’m happy to say my skin fully returned to normal, and I learned a thing or two about skin turned suddenly oily. If you’re like me and your skin isn’t typically oily, don’t turn to acne cleansers right away – instead get back on your old routine, or simplify and give your skin a little TLC and moisture to see if dryness is the culprit.
-Brooke
Thank you Skin Resource.MD for sponsoring this post.
