You’ve just picked up the latest Vogue and are sitting down with your coffee in hand. The cover boasts the beautiful and flawless Hailey Bieber, her skin glowing like never before. You must know her secret, what products she uses, and how you can have skin just like hers?!

Celebrities and beauty bloggers have a big following but do they really know what makes the skin tick? Skin is SO personal to everyone, and what we put on it is vital to our skin’s health and look.   In this blog, I’m walking you through some of the misconceptions and downfalls when it comes down to cosmetics. Here’s what you need to know.

I totally get it. Makeup is beautiful. It makes our skin glow, transforms our appearance, and it’s downright your thing. The creativity, beauty, and magic of changing faces bring out your best features and be unique! There are certainly some talented makeovers to see on the net. There is even one happening at my clinic this Thursday! (You can get your tickets here) 

All this beauty but makeup can have an ugly side to it.

Take makeup-wipes, for instance. 

Cleansers consist of oil, water, and plenty of preservatives and emulsifiers. Add some fragrances and perfumes to the mix to make the product attractive and increase its shelf life. It is then packaged to your convenience in the form of wipes, foams, gels, sprays. How innovative is this marketing?! The more attractive and straightforward, the better.

— Skincare plans typically start with addressing and improving these essentials when beginning the road to skin barrier recovery. 

We often listen to celebrities, influencers with beautiful skin endorsing what they love to use. Watching tv and going through magazines looking over the cosmetics and makeup on display. It works for them, so it’ll work for us, right? 

A BIG ‘faux-pas’ and consequential things go wrong.  Products like this may give you an illusion of flawless and perfect skin, but it is not always sustainable and beneficial to the skin long term. 

It’s like putting a bandaid over a wound, it masks the damage, a short term solution to skin management and can often make issues worse in the long run. 

What if I told you you could find exactly what you need for your skin and the best products catered to work for you.

By learning about the hard facts, the science of our skin, and knowing your skin, inside and out, you can make informed decisions to have the best skin health possible. Through being a conscious consumer, you will understand the effects cheap ingredients and over the counter products will have on our skin barrier … it might bring you a light bulb moment!

Our skin barrier is a delicate layer of complex skin cells that are in constant communication. As the largest organ of our body, its job is to keep things out (pathogens and bacteria) and keep things in. Understandably we must take care of this little layer that is so often overlooked and mistreated.

Think about what we apply every day, morning and night;

• cleansers and scrubs
• moisturizer and masks
• toner
• serums
• eye cream
• sun protection
• primer
• makeup foundation
• bronzer
• highlighter
• Blush …

Say about ten products a day (for some less, for some this will be even more)

Skincare is applied twice a day, so that means the harmful fragrances, emulsifiers, and preservatives are also being used to our precious skin twice a day! 

To make matters worse, we apply a foundation for ‘flawless’ skin, laden with silicones and colors to give it the appearance it’s advertised for.

Would this be good for your skin?

At the end of a busy day (— let’s hope we’re not too tired to cleanse our skin, sometimes it is the last thing we feel like doing) stubborn makeup needs more than one cleanse to be removed, and often the skin barrier gets a good ‘scrub’ to have clean and beautiful skin. 

This, however, is not good news for our skin barrier. 

Our very own lipids and water, the acid mantle (the thin, delicate layer on top of our epidermis) is removed. The acid mantel has a vital job to do. It’s there to protect us. It is a beautiful, intelligent wee ecosystem in constant communication with our cells and systems underneath the skin. We may remove that stubborn makeup through good hard scrubbing, but we are also removing those necessary lipids, water, and acid mantle, leaving our skin open to more damage. 

When the acid mantel (skin barrier) is disrupted, communication within the skin fails, and leads to interrupted signalling pathways. For instance when the melanocyte (cell responsible for pigmentation) is involved, this can lead to irregular pigmentation, causing uneven complexion of your skin. The skin is left unprotected and harmful pathogens and bacteria enter the skin.

Often the results are sensitivity, irritation, dryness, and flakiness. The cosmetic world makes you believe they have all the products you need to choose from to combat this. Whether it’s makeup to hide the redness or congestion, primer to make your makeup sit beautiful all day long, to makeup wipes taking all the cosmetics off. To make our skin feel less dry, we use a moisturizer or mask to combat the feeling of dryness and irritation. We feel as if we are so spoiled for choice with these luxurious smelling, eco, and ‘natural’ products. Still, we don’t realize that what these celebrities and beauty bloggers are promoting are products that hold many harmful ingredients that are more detrimental to our skin than beneficial. 

If you want to use beneficial products for your skin and for the environment, check out the mineral makeup at the clinic or have a chat with me.

Suitable makeup for the skin — equal parts clean ingredients and simplistic to help women enhance their radiance and lives. The natural skincare formulas and multitasking mineral makeup are high-performance, clean, and cruelty-free, providing practical, targeted solutions for a healthy, radiant complexion. 

Skin is personal to everyone, so you must know your skin, inside and out, to make your own informed choices.