How Your Environment Affects Your Skin

Close up portrait of a beautiful young african american woman relaxing outdoors

In the winter, the role your environment plays on your skin is obvious. The combination of cold temps outside and warm air inside often creates dry, itchy, irritated skin. Let’s go beyond climate and season, though, and expand to all external factors that can affect your skin. These include: public spaces, chemicals, or minerals in household products, and even your pets. Here are four common environmental factors to be aware of and how to monitor them for skin health: Stay away from sensitizing ingredients, which include fragrances, parabens, and dyes. I urge you avoid these not only in skin-care products, but also in makeup, hair care, and laundry detergent. Once you remove sensitive ingredients from your environment, you might find you don’t have sensitive skin, but rather sensitized skin from external factors. It’s likely you touch public hand rails and door knobs, or maybe you have a pet that goes inside and outside ...

Five Steps to Treating & Preventing Sun Damage

Read the full post on BeautyXpose. Even with proper sunscreen application, you may have experienced sun damage this summer. Freckles, moles, wrinkles and uneven skin tone are signs of sun damage. There are few simple steps to treat sun-damaged skin and prevent future damage: I can’t emphasize this enough: protect the skin on a daily basis using a full-spectrum sunscreen with an SPF of 15 or higher. If you are active throughout the day, remember to reapply your sunscreen. Powerful antioxidants like vitamin C help protect the skin against UV rays, too. C boosts the effectiveness of your sunscreen, so I urge you to apply a C serum daily underneath your sunscreen moisturizer. You should resurface the skin on a consistent basis. Resurfacing is a way to exfoliate the skin that gently dissolves dead skin cells, some of which are likely to be discolored on the skin’s surface. Consistent resurfacing not only evens the ...