What Skincare Basic Principles Do You Need to Begin Your Natural Skincare Journey?
1. Learn How To Research Skincare Ingredients
These days there are too many skincare products on the market, and too many skincare ingredients. It’s hard to keep track of exactly what you’re putting on your skin, or to pinpoint the skincare products with natural, cleaner ingredient options.
You can start by searching up the ingredients listed for products using resources such as the Environmental Working Group (EWG), a non-profit organization dedicated to research and education about environmental and health concerns.
You should be looking to minimize exposure to known irritants, allergens, and carcinogens, including parabens, synthetic fragrance and colors, triclosan, sulphates, and petrolatum/mineral oils.
EWG uses a scoring system from 1-10 to rate the known and suspected hazards of ingredients based on published literature.
Factors that you can look at include:
- carcinogenicity (associations with cancer)
- developmental and reproductive toxicity (e.g. infertility, birth defects, and developmental delays)
- allergies and immunogenicity (harm to the immune system),
- endocrine disruption
- eye, skin and lung irritation
- organ system toxicity, and
- ecotoxicology (toxicity posed to the environment).
A score of 1-2 is classified as “low hazard”, 3-6 is “moderate hazard” and 7-10 is “high hazard”. You should try to keep clear of skincare containing ingredients in the high hazard category, and stick to skincare with the majority of ingredients that fall in the low hazard category.
If you have trouble doing this search process initially, at least begin by choosing skincare that is labelled for sensitive skin, because these tend to contain less irritants and allergens.
2. How To Work Out Your Skin Type
Next you need to work out what skin type you are. If you can’t tell, cleanse your face and don’t put any products on for 10 minutes. If after 10 minutes, your skin feels oily or looks shiny, then you have oily skin (no-brainer). If your skin is looking shiny but feels dry, then it’s likely a type of skin called “oily-dehydrated”. If it is oily in some areas but dry in others, then you have combination skin. If it looks flakey or feels dry everywhere, then you have dry skin, and if it feels and looks good everywhere, then you have what is called “normal” skin! Often you will fall somewhere in between these on the spectrum, for example if your skin mostly looks and feels normal, but there are still some oily bits, then you have “normal to combination” skin.
3. Learn To Take It Slow
Only introduce one skincare product at a time, and introduce one active ingredient at a time. This way, you can easily differentiate the effects of different skincare products, and you can identify which active ingredients are making the best improvements to your skin, and which ones are responsible for any side effects.
We don’t introduce new skincare around the time of our periods. This is because the body will be undergoing a lot of hormonal fluctuations then, making it more likely to break out, so be careful about not irritating it further by introducing new things during this time.
4. Learn How to Effectively Cleanse Your Skin
The fundamental principle of cleansing is not so much about getting things clean, but rather, how not to over cleanse. Don’t aim for the squeaky clean feel after cleansing. This is damaging to your natural skin barrier.
Generally you should double cleanse - that is first use an oil cleanser, followed by a water-based cleanser.
Water and oil don’t mix, but oil dissolves oil…and makeup, sunscreen, and other skincare we apply on our face that contain oil-based substances! This is why an oil cleanser is needed to “melt” these substances first so they can then be washed away without you needing to scrub at your face for extended periods of time. The Heimish All Clean Balm or the Farmacy Green Clean Balm both do a good job of removing grease and oil without drying out our skin.
If you are wearing heavy makeup, you may need to go in with a dedicated makeup remover as well, to remove the remaining makeup residue (e.g. an eye makeup remover like the Neutrogena Oil Free Eye Makeup Remover if you are wearing heavy eye makeup. For general makeup removal, we like using the Garnier Micellar Cleansing Water or the Garnier Clean Sensitive In Waterproof Make Up Remover.
It’s better for your skin to use two gentle cleansers rather than scrubbing aggressively for extended periods of time with one cleanser.
The addition of a second cleanser is not to strip your skin of its natural lipid barrier, but instead serves the reverse process! In general, for the second cleanser, we recommend gel cleansers over foaming cleansers because the latter tends to be too drying for people unless you have oily skin. For instance, we recommend the La Roche-Posay Toleriane Dermo-Cleanser (rather than the foaming version), because it does a good job of cleaning combination skin without making it too dry.
Make sure to leave cleanser on your face for less than one minute. If you are starting off with a completely bare face anyway, you can skip oil cleanser and use a gel cleanser only.
5. Learn How to Layer Skincare
As a general rule, you should layer your skincare from the thinnest to the thickest formulation. Apply water-based formulations first, apply essence/toner before serum, then lotions, then creams, then facial oils.
The catch though, is that you need to ensure that none of the individual ingredients in each of the skincare products you use clash with each other, which could neutralise each other’s efficacy at best, or worse, cause severe skin irritation and breakouts. See our post on what not to mix for more details about this.
By the way…some of the skincare we recommend are available on iHerb, which we use to buy a lot of our organic skincare. You can use our code AEJ0519 at checkout to get 5% off.
6. Choose the Right Toner, Serum and Moisturizer.
This is where the fun begins! To save you the hassle of trying a million different products to find the right one, check out our guides on the best natural toners and essences, serums and moisturizers for your skin!
7. Know the Importance of Sunscreen
If you are going outdoors (or even if you are indoors with exposure to UV light), it’s essential that you apply sunscreen as the last and final step!
UV radiation can cause pigmentation, speed up the skin’s aging process, worsen post inflammatory hyperpigmentation, and increase the risk of skin cancer. The type of sunscreen you choose will depend on your skin tone, skin type, and preference.
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P.S…this is probably obvious, but the information presented doesn’t constitute medical advice - always check with your own doctor!
