Exfoliation & Over Exfoliation – Getting it right!
The tricky thing about exfoliation is it can either work wonders for your skin, or it can destroy your skin barrier.
Most high street exfoliators are gritty, grainy and you scrub around your face until it feels raw and tingly thinking if it hurts it must be doing something! This type of exfoliating in most cases is damaging your skin.
When you use the right product, exfoliation is fabulous, smoothing rough patches, fading acne scars and dark spots, reduce redness and brighten your overall complexion.
Why Exfoliate?
When you are young all your dead skin cells fall off in a programmed fashion every 28 days but as we age these dead skin cell layers hang around for up to 40 or 60 or even 80 days! And although they are too tiny to see, they can make your skin look dull, discoloured and cause break outs from clogging pores.
Worse they can block your skincare products from properly absorbing into your skin. Same goes for makeup it will never be smoothly applied if the surface of your skin is rough from dead cells.
Exfoliation the game changer
When you exfoliate you remove those dead skin cells that your body is not shedding to make way for newer, happier, and healthier skin cells.
The result glowing, smooth skin.
How to Exfoliate, Physical or Chemical?
Physical facial exfoliators always cause more damage than they are worth, the abrasiveness causes micro-tears on your face that slowly destroy your skin barrier - never a good idea for your face.
The only Physical/Mechanical exfoliator advised is Professional Dermaplaning, this is a controlled removal of vellus hair (peach fuzz) and dead skin cells from the top layer of the epidermis (the stratum corneum). Check out our Dermaplaning facial at Ohh! We combine this with our gentle enzymatic peel using fruit acids and our soothing EGF sheet mask for the ultimate in Dermaplaning.
Chemical exfoliators are far superior! Instead of relying on a mechanical force to tear off the cells of your face as in your gritty high street products, chemical exfoliators use gentle acids to dissolve keratin ‘the glue’ that binds your dead cells together to slowly reveal brighter, smoother, more even-looking skin. Chemical exfoliators are not only gentler and more effective than physical formulas, but they also come in different forms depending on what your skin needs.
At Ohh! We have 3 chemical exfoliator options
The gentle enzymatic peel in CLINICCARE Instant Painless Peel & The two formulas AHA’s & BHA’s, Alpha hydroxy acid and Beta hydroxy acid which penetrate deeper in the skin and are more targeted.
Best for normal, dry, sensitive, or redness-prone skin is our AHA’s. These are water soluble, meaning they exfoliate the surface of your skin, drawing in moisture while they work to keep your face hydrated. They are superheroes at ‘ungluing’ dead cells to make skin brighter and smoother.
Best for oily or acne prone skin is our BHA’s. These are oil soluble meaning they break down oil-clogged pores to treat blackheads, whiteheads, and spots, they are also anti-inflammatory.
At Ohh! We only use the best products, Skin Geek Salicylic Acid Wash which I cannot rave about enough it put a stop to horrendous Maskne I was personally suffering due to respirator masks at work and my beloved CLINICCARE products.
The reason behind my personal choice is that the highest level of Pharmaceutical/Cosmeceutical products contain the lowest molecular content with the highest active ingredients. Your skin is 30 nanometers, over the counter skincare is between 600-3000 nanometers (never penetrates the surface), most cosmeceutical products are around 18 nanometers which is good, however CLINICCARE is one of only 2 companies in the world using technology that allows for their product range to be between 5-8 nanometers! This means it gets to where the magic happens.
Exfoliation also allows for the transportation of the ‘good stuff’ to where it matters.
A CAUTIOUS TALE
If you over exfoliate then the skin barrier feels under attack and the skin will respond in producing more sebum to try and protect the breached barrier, an overproduction of sebum can cause blockage of pores, oily skin, and therefore more problems.
A lot of people are stuck in an unhappy skin cycle, we sometimes need to strip it all back, start afresh. The skins metabolism can be kickstarted at any time. The skin should be slightly acidic and often we are causing our skins to be super reactive/super sensitive by keeping it alkaline and then over scrubbing and drying it out with all the wrong products.
Remember at Ohh! We are here to help, drop us a message or book in for a no obligation consultation for tailored advice, we want to work with you to ensure you stay fabulous!
Jacqui x
