Think Skipping Your Skin Care Routine is No Big Deal? You Might Want to Think Again
What is your basic skincare routine?
No matter what your age, if your routine includes nothing more than washing with soap and water (ugh!), you are skipping a key step to beauty and skin health.
As the title says, if you skip this step, you may be making a mistake. Make that a BIG mistake.
In fact, experts say that never replacing makeup brushes, never tossing outdated beauty products, and skipping a daily skincare routine are huge mistakes. The biggest you might make.
Why?
In brief: They allow the skin to age, become irritated and look unhealthy and/or unattractive.
Before we can understand how that might work, let’s first consider just what a skincare routine should look like.
Knowing what you should be doing to protect and improve your skin can help you see the hazards that skipping a good routine will cause.
The Skincare Routine 101
So, just what do we mean when we say skincare routine? First things first, it should be chosen for your current skin type.
This means your routine should be for either dry, oily, acne-prone, sensitive, or combination skin. Then, you should use products twice daily.
Every morning you should:
- Wash with a gentle facial cleanser
- Use a toner
- Apply serums for specific issues (i.e. deep hydrating, anti-aging, acne clearing, and so on)
- Moisturize (daytime products should have SPF or you should apply a sunblock at the end of the morning routine)
Every evening is similar with the exception of sunblock. Instead, your evening serums should be healing or restoring and your moisturizer a more intense formula to help your skin make repairs as you rest.
In other words, choose both daytime and night time formulations for your skin type and conditions.
Keep in mind that a good skincare routine also incorporates other measures. For example, you will want to use a regular exfoliating product, facial masks for specific issues, peels to trigger cellular regeneration, and so on.
You’ll also want to keep an eye on the expiration dates of any and all products applied to the skin, including makeup. Using outdated solutions can create all kinds of problems for your skin or complexion.
And, replacing makeup brushes has to be a priority in your routine, too.
“Hold on,” you might say, “I get the need to do regular cleaning and healing as well as tossing old makeup and products, but what’s with the replacing makeup brushes requirement?”
Why Replacing Makeup Brushes is Part of a Skincare Routine
We strongly recommend a regular method for replacing makeup brushes as part of an effective skincare routine for several reasons.
First things first, your makeup brushes are breeding grounds for mold, bacteria, microbes and worse. If you are not replacing makeup brushes, you are actually applying these disgusting compounds to your skin and your makeup.
This means that even a great skincare routine can be destroyed by the use of old and outdated brushes since they can contaminate new products and leave your skin super vulnerable.
As an example, you have a bottle of primer. To apply it, put your makeup sponge or foundation brush over the end and tip it upside down. You’ve now contaminated the product with whatever germs were on your applicator.
The same goes for the blusher you apply with an old brush. The brush could be full of compounds that, not only now live in your blush, but also irritate your skin. That irritation causes breakouts, dryness, and aging. Yikes.
You could enter a cycle of repeatedly irritating the skin and contaminating makeup because you are not replacing makeup brushes. Combine that with the use of old products and your skin gets a double whammy.
Formulating Your Solution
If you ask skin experts about the ideal skincare routine, most would supply you with an outline that looks like the one we already provided (cleanse, tone, serum, and so on). They would advise you to pay attention to changes in your skin.
After all, your oily skin in the summer can turn into dry-as-the-desert skin in the winter.
Your best skin care is the care that addresses your skin right now.
With that in mind, you must then keep track of the dates that you begin using products. You can just use a system for noting it on the product itself (just note the date you opened the product on the label with a permanent marker!).
How long can you keep products? The answers are not fixed because you could be contaminating them with old and bacteria-heavy brushes.
However, if you are someone who is already replacing makeup brushes on a regular schedule, you can keep:
- Lipsticks for a single year
- Liquid foundation, primer and BB or CC formulas can last 18 to 24 months
- Powders (blush and eye shadow) can be kept up to 24 months
- Lining pencils should be discarded within 12 months, but liquid eyeliner has to go within 90 days and the same applies to mascara
Remember, this is a schedule strictly for those already replacing brushes frequently. While you can clean them, it is best to update brushes on a monthly basis.
“Wait!” you might have just shrieked, “I just dropped almost $100 on a few brushes. I have to do that every month?”
In a word: No.
In two words: Absolutely not!
Most brushes just cannot be cleaned enough to be kept healthy and in good shape. That is why subscription brush services are becoming so interesting and appealing.
However, you want reasonable prices, consistent quality and brushes that you really use. After all, some services just mail out new brushes and other supplies in a beauty kit every month – how do you know you’ll need them all?
Options like the month to month subscription from BEAUTIAC, however, is a preferable solution to this dilemma.
It includes a set of “refill heads” for the foundation, powder and blush styles brushes. These fit on the ergonomic handles that come with a starter kit. Made of 100% recyclable materials and in a cruelty-free manner, the heads pop off and get recycled every month.
Keep your skin looking its best and optimize your makeup brush game with this simple method of brush care and maintenance.