Your skin may still be smarting from the overdose of UV rays you treated it to this past summer. By now, hopefully, your sunburns are already on their way to recovery, but I’m guessing you’re going to want to do something about your dull, dry, and flaky skin.
After moisturizing daily and heavily with an aloe vera-based moisturizer, you might want to try exfoliating. (Yes, in this case, moisturize first before anything else.) Again, the important thing to remember here is that skin shouldn’t be painful to touch anymore, which means you can slough off the dead skin cells without irritating your skin further.
There are two types of exfoliators that you should be familiar with. The first are physical or mechanical exfoliators, like scrubs. You can make your own scrub using coconut or almond oil and mixing it with brown sugar instead of using scrubs with plastic microbeads, which enter our oceans and negatively affect the environment.
There are also different tools that people can use to manually exfoliate, like konjac sponges or muslin cloths. While konjac sponges can be replaced every month, muslin cloths must be thrown into the laundry after every use.
The second type of exfoliators are chemical exfoliators, which may sound harsh, but are actually very gentle. Your facial wash or favorite facial mask could be gently exfoliating your skin if it contains glycolic, lactic, or salicylic acid. There are also exfoliating gels you can use that gently ball your dead skin cells together, so you can rinse them off. (To see our recommendations, click through the slideshow above!)
These types of exfoliators are better for sensitive, dry, acne-prone, or sun damaged skin, since you may be overenthusiastic in your manual scrubbing and cause irritation. Hey, we’ve all been guilty of over-scrubbing our faces.
As for how often you should be exfoliating, the jury is out. The famous New York-based celebrity dermatologist Dr. Patricia Wexler recommends doing physical exfoliation every day. On the other hand, Dr. Jody Levine, in an interview with Nylon, also advocates daily exfoliation, but with a caveat: “At home, daily chemical exfoliation with a gentle exfoliating acid is appropriate but mechanical exfoliation with scrubs should be performed one to two times weekly. A stronger, in-office treatment can be performed monthly.”
She also offers a pro tip with regards to the best time of day to exfoliate: “As skin renews itself when you sleep, I recommend exfoliating in the morning to help slough away dead skin cells that accumulated overnight.”
After, it’s important to moisturize all over again, since exfoliation strips the skin of its natural sebum, and when this happens, your skin could ramp up the oil production to compensate, leading to clogged pores. Not a good look if your skin is already burned.
Photos by Jash Manuel