Your skin has good habits. Do you?

In Cleansing

1. The skin has an automatic habit of renewing itself through desquamation.   
2. Desquamation is an exfoliation process that sheds a layer of skin at a time. 
3. Cleansing helps keep our skin’s processes functioning at the optimum level. 
4. Some of our bad habits could negatively affect the skin’s processes.

The Pond’s Institute discovered that our skin is actually pretty good at taking care of itself. Under optimum condition, it is able to regulate its own temperature and moisture levels, protect itself from the sun’s harmful rays and even conduct its own self-renewal process.

So we asked The Pond’s Institute to tell us more about the skin’s self-renewal habits.

How does the skin renew itself?

The skin’s self-renewal process is called desquamation— a natural, gentle, self-exfoliation

process. The skin is designed to shed layers in an orderly manner. This involves skin enzymes to remove a cellular structure called desmosomes which help the cells bind together. Skin sheds about one layer per day, and this happens naturally, by design.

So, does this mean we don’t need to care for our skin?

Unfortunately for us, we live in an age polluted with contaminants— harmful UV rays, chemicals, dust, dirt and bacteria. These pollutants, together with the hot, dry or cold climates we live in, can produce harsh conditions inside our skin making it not function properly and creating a more disorganized cell-renewal process. This is why we need to cleanse.

Cleansing helps our skin to maintain healthy skin renewal. It removes dirt, impurities and excess oil from the pores, while preparing our skin to absorb treatments and moisture, so it can achieve a healthy moisture balance.

But sometimes, we unknowingly make things difficult for our own skin. Our bad habits might in fact be contributing to our skin concerns like pimples, dark spots and wrinkles.

What are some of the bad habits to avoid?

Not removing makeup at night

Your skin fights all the foreign bodies clogging up your pores while you sleep. So leaving your makeup on overnight can worsen pimples and make your skin dull and dry. This can also accelerate the signs of ageing in the skin. So always cleanse your skin before you sleep.

Using expired products

When you use beauty products way past their sell-by date, you might be harming your skin instead of improving it. Expired products might have become contaminated with bacteria or mould. Additionally, when products expire, the active ingredients reduce their efficacy.

Washing your face with body soap

Body soap is not formulated for facial skin care so it can be too harsh for your face. This makes your skin more prone to drying out and, in the long-term, more prone to premature ageing. Facial cleansers are gentler on the skin and have the added benefit of providing solutions with specific ingredients for your skin concern.

Read more about ditching the body soap here.