Great skin care each day can help you rid of mild to moderate blemishes and pimples and keep them gone for good. It just takes careful attention to what you skin needs. Here five ways you can give your skin what it needs and win you.
- Skin needs to be clean
Cleanse your skin enough but not too much. This means that what you really need to be taking off your face is dead skin and excess skin oil. Scrubbing your face with a washcloth only rearranges dead skin on your face. And anything that makes your face feel tingly will just irritate your skin, causing it to soothe itself by making more skin oil.
The way to cleanse your skin is to let a gentle cleanser do the work.
- Skin needs moisture.
You can’t dry up your skin to get rid of acne. The moisture in your skin keeps it flexible, and flexible skin allows pores to expel dead skin, excess oil, and excess bacteria.
Apply moisturizer to damp, but not dripping, recently cleansed skin. Use a water-based or even oil-based moisturizer, never a product made with alcohol
- Popping pimples never work. Use disinfectant gels instead.
Popping a pimple may or may not open your skin, but it will definitely force acne bacteria deeper into your skin. Your immune system continues to fight them even when skin has grown over the site of the old pimple, and may create a cyst.
The way to treat a pimple is to kill excess bacteria and then let your skin do the rest of the work of healing. Use the mildest possible benzoyl peroxide product in the morning, starting at 2.5% or less. This kills excess bacteria. Then dab the pimple with a clean cotton swab you have soaked in tea tree oil in the evening. This gets the red out. If you have fair skin, this may be enough, but if you have Asian skin, you also need to use a vitamin E product on the pimple .Vitamin E prevents the formation of a brown spot when the blemish heals.
- Popping blackheads does not work, either. Use exfoliants to loose the skin around a blackhead so that it comes out on its own.
Let blackheads come up on their own. You can apply moisturizer around the blackhead to loose the skin that is holding it tight. You can even lay a clean cloth you have soaked in warm (not steaming!) water to the skin for a few minutes several times a day.
- When you can’t get rid of a pimple or blemish right away cover it up with a concealer
