3 Tips To Take Care Of Your Skin

I have never had the best skin. And I’ll admit that it’s largely due to the fact that I used to be quite lazy when it came to my skin care and about generally doing all the things that you should to get healthy skin.

This month though, I decided that I finally wanted to try my hardest to make my skin look good and healthy. So I slowly started introducing some lifestyle changes and while my skin obviously isn’t magically all clean and perfect now, I feel like I’m finally at a stage where I feel happy with my skin and I feel like I’m doing enough to keep it looking good. So today, as part of the last in my 3 part beauty series, I decided to tell you guys about the changes I have made in my life to keep up with my skin’s health.

1) Drink More Water

Okay Okay! I know. Everybody and their mother’s tell you to drink more water. But it’s true. It really helps. Not only does it help to clear up your face and make it look more vibrant but it has tons of other benefits for your entire body.

So I used to be chronically bad at drinking water. Literally I used to sometimes just forget to drink more then 200ml of water a day. That’s one glass if you’re wondering. I have now managed to increase that to an average of about 1600ml a day. How? Well I discovered a stupid little app.

I’ve tried many apps for drinking more water but nothing has really worked. This month though, I rediscovered Plant Nanny. I say rediscovered because I knew it existed. I’ve actually tried it before but it didn’t work. I guess this time I was a bit more determined.

So this app basically calculates how much water you will need per day and then it gives you a plant. Your task is to keep this silly little plant alive by watering it. So say you drink 200ml of water. You would then go into the app and log that down. So you get 200ml of water and your plant gets 200ml. If you slack on your drinking, your plant will get sad and eventually will shrivel up and die. It’s quite effective I would say.

This is my little plant:

Okay honestly, I just chugged 650ml of water to get my plant all happy and fresh for this screenshot. Not gonna lie. I feel like I’m drowning.

2) Make SPF Your Best Friend

 

I live in a very hot and sunny country. Which means that it is impossible for me to evade the sun. So I actually started using moisturisers with an SPF of 15 from the beginning of this year and I’ve really noticed a difference.

So make SPF a must when you are leaving the house. It doesn’t matter if you live in Singapore where the sun will literally burn you alive or if you live in freaking Sweden where they once only had 20 minutes of sunlight. WEAR SPF.

*By the way, an SPF of 15 is the bare minimum so look out for that before buying one*

3) Establish A Skin Care Routine…And Stick To It!

This is one of the most important steps because you can drinks gallons upon gallons of water (don’t do that. There is such a thing as too much water) and you can slather on  an SPF of 800 but if you aren’t regularly cleansing and moisturising your skin, you really won’t be doing yourself a favour.

I like to follow this three step rule to my skin care routine. Cleanse, Tone and Moisturise. So you can use that as a basic outline when coming up with your skin care routine.

I recently did a blog post where I walked you guys through my night time skin care routine. So if you want some elaboration or product suggestions, you can head on over to that post as well.

So those are my 3 tips on taking care of your skin. I still have a whole load of other tips so if you would like a part 2, let me know. Also don’t forget to tell me what your favourite skin care tip is if it isn’t in my list.

I will be resuming my bookish posts after this and I just wanted to say thank you for supporting my 3 days of beauty posts. I really enjoyed sharing my night time skin care routine, my favourite lip products and my skin care tips with you guys. Hopefully you guys enjoyed it as much as I did.

xoxo

My Nightly Skin Care Routine

When I first started my blog, I used to focus mainly on beauty posts. I took a lot of photos and I talked endlessly about hair and makeup and the joys of exfoliating.

As my blog grew, I slowly came to the realisation that my passion lay mostly with books. While I love makeup and anything beauty related, it did take a backseat to my love for reading.

However, that didn’t stop the ideas. Oh the ideas for beauty related posts were endless. But these kinds of posts requires more photography then I could do while in school. And there was also the fact that I was now a book blogger and not a beauty one.

So I thought I would finally indulge myself (and hopefully you guys too) by doing a series of beauty posts over the next few days. Sounds good? I think so.

As you can probably see by the title, I am going to be walking you guys through my nightly skin care routine today. Now I would just like to say here that I am by no means someone who is very on top of their skin care. I am terrible at it actually. I usually skip steps, forget to do things or just plain pretend my cleanser doesn’t exist.

That said though, this month I decided to start taking my skin care more seriously and that started with establishing a regular routine for myself. Of course I did my best to make it the quickest and most efficient one and considering that I’ve pretty much stuck to it, I think I’ve succeeded.

1) Cleansing

This is the first and most basic step in any skin care routine. You need to make sure that you clean your face and get rid of all the grime of the day.

For that, I use Pond’s Acne Clear Multi Action Facial Foam and Scrub. I could go on for days about how much I love this product.

So first of all, it’s the type that lathers. I love pretty much anything that lathers because I feel like it really lets you stretch your buck. You can use just a little bit and it will lather up to be able to cover your entire face and then some. So you can use this for ages before you have to replenish it.

Secondly, it’s a very gentle exfoliant. Now you know I love my exfoliants. This product has a few little exfoliating beads that clean your pores without being too harsh on the skin (because you do know that you can’t use a harsh exfoliator on a daily basis right?). So I’m able to fulfill my intense desire to exfoliate without ruining my skin. Yay!

So I use the Pond’s Facial Foam every evening except for Sundays. Sunday is my deep clean day. So I usually skip my facial foam and just use my beloved St Ives Apricot Scrub on Sundays.

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you would know that I LOVE this product. It is the first thing I would recommend anyone. It is basically an exfoliator in and out except that unlike the Pond’s one, it is much more intense. So you unfortunately can’t use it everyday (I tried it once and while it is incredibly lovely in the moment, the long term effects aren’t so great). So I use it once a week just to really properly clean my face. It leaves my skin feeling so smooth and soft and delightful.

Now you don’t have to choose Sundays to be your deep clean day. You can pick any day of the week. I decided on Sunday because I only start school in the afternoons on Monday. Which means I get the whole night and morning to be makeup free. And if you haven’t caught my drift yet, it basically means that after a deep exfoliation, I can give my skin and pores the maximum time to breathe before I put on my makeup.

So pick a day that suits your lifestyle and try to allow your skin to breathe as much as you can after a deep clean.

2) Toning

 

The next step is to tone your face. Now I’m fairly new to toning and all I can say is that if you’ve never tried it, you need to asap. Because it feels heavenly. 

What toners do is that they basically provide an extra cleaning for your face. It tightens your pores, it balances your PH levels and it basically makes you feel like you can rule the world.

I use the Himalaya Herbals Refreshing & Clarifying Toner every night. You just dab a little onto a cotton pad and rub that all over your face. The cotton pad should come away slightly dirty even if you’ve just cleansed your face. That’s because cleansing doesn’t remove all the dirt from your face. Toners do. Toners clean your pores and your face crevices. Trust me. It’s amazing.

If you’re in a rush though or perhaps extremely tired, you can choose to just tone your face or just cleanse. I recommend doing both but if you really can’t, pick one. At least your face will have some semblance of being clean.

3) Moisturising 

Once your face is dry from the toner, you want to moisterise to lock in that moisture and to make sure your skin doesn’t dry out.

For that, I use the Nivea Night Whitening Body Lotion. This stuff smells amazing and it makes your skin feel very cool and soft. I absolutely adore it.

If you have sensitive skin, another favorite of mine is the Johnson’s Baby Bedtime lotion. Don’t judge me. Baby lotion is freaking amazing and don’t tell me you don’t want to smell like a baby when you sleep. Plus it’s clinically proven to help babies sleep better so who’s the real winner here?

4) Lip Balm

This step is optional because it really depends on how you sleep. I use lip balm because I sleep in an air conditioned room and while my lips don’t really crack or get dry easily, I like to protect them and make sure that they are well moisturised. If anything, it’s for my future.

So I use the Burt Bee’s Ultra Conditioning Lip Balm with Kokum Butter. I discovered this back in April when I was in Seattle. I used it every single night and it was amazing.

I will admit though that this lip balm is very heavy. It’s a clear balm and the kokum butter is very noticable. For people who aren’t used to using a lip balm, this can feel rather strange and uncomfortable. So I would recommend that you apply it about a half hour before bed just so that it settles and it doesn’t feel like you need to be ultra careful with your lips like if you were wearing lipstick (because who wants that when you’re all ready to snuggle into bed?)

If you really can’t handle such a heavey lip balm you can go for my second favorite and just as effective lip balm which is the Burt’s Bees Replenishing Lip Balm with Pomegranate Oil. That is usually the one I use in the day time under my lipstick because it’s a lot more lighter.

So that is it for my night time skin care routine. It’s pretty basic and I usually do it while watching YouTube videos or reading so it doesn’t require you to really set aside time to do it.

I hope that it helps some of you who want to start establishing a routine and don’t forget to let me know in the comments if you have any extra steps in your routine because I know mine is still pretty basic.

I will be putting up a series of beauty posts over the next few days so follow me or subscribe to keep up to date.

Xoxo