Skin Care for Sensitive Skin

Skin Care for Sensitive Skin - Breaking the Cycle

What is the best skin care for sensitive skin? These tips will help you take care of your sensitive skin and show you how to find the best skin care products for your skin without causing more breakouts!

If you have really sensitive skin, you've probably been through this a thousand times. You see a nice looking makeup, facial cream or shampoo at the drugstore. You bring it home, give yourself a nice facial or shampoo, and the next thing you know...

UGH! Your face is breaking out into a thousand little red or brown dots! Then, instead of looking great, you want to hide!!

Well, there IS another way to handle your sensitive skin that will prevent many of these upsetting skin breakouts. Though it might seems like a hassle at first, in the long run it will save you time AND money to treat your sensitive skin gently!

Here's how to break the cycle and avoid most skin inflammations.

Skin Care for Sensitive Skin - Doing a Skin Test

What is a skin test? This is a fancy looking word for a very simple precaution that you can take to avoid exposing yourself to irritating skin care or personal care products. Believe it or not, even sensitive skin products can inflame your face, so I recommend doing a skin test whenever you use ANY new skin care or personal care product.

Skin Test Instructions

• Place a small amount of the sensitive skin products that you want to try on the inside of your forearm or behind your ear.
• Wait 24 hours. If there is no reaction, then try applying it to your face.

Skin Care for Sensitive Skin - Daily Routine

The best skin care for sensitive skin is a gentle daily routine of cleansing, toning and moisturizing. If you have additional time, you can also do a weekly or monthly deep cleaning and exfoliation treatment using gentle facial masks and steam.

A good daily routine will keep your complexion clear and smooth, and will prevent many skin problems that happen from a build up of dirt and oil on the face.

Because your skin needs a little extra tender loving care, it may take you a little more time to finding the right daily routine for your skin. You will need to do a skin test for each new facial treatment you decide to try. For more about how to create the most effective daily routine for your sensitive skin please see our Skin Care Tips section.

Sometimes changes in your life can cause changes in your skin. The hormonal changes of puberty, pregnancy or menopause can cause changes in the needs of our skin. You may even find that the products you are accustomed to using are now causing skin break outs!

Changes in your diet and your daily routine can also cause changes to your skin. Sometimes for no apparent reason, you can suddenly become sensitive or allergic to a skin care ingredient that previously caused no problems. A few years ago my skin starting breaking out from products that I had been using for years!

How to Find the Right Sensitive Skin Products

The best skin care for sensitive skin uses gentle, hypoallergenic products with a SHORT list of ingredients. Really good sensitive skin products will help your face look and feel radiant and clear WITHOUT a long list of ingredients.

Why fewer ingredients? This will minimize the chance that one of them will cause an allergic reaction to your sensitive skin!

When you have sensitive skin, you may find that you get rashes and outbreaks whenever you use a new skin care product, even if it is all natural or a homemade skin care recipe.

As I mentioned before, it is important to first do a skin test on the inside of our arm or behind your ear before you use anything new on your face.

The best products for sensitive skin will be gentle, hypoallergenic products that are free from:

• Fragrance and perfumes
• Artificial dyes and colorings
• Toxic or allergy producing ingredients
• Herbal, essential oil or botanical ingredients

Why avoid herbal and essential oil ingredients? Isn't all natural better?

Well, for some people it is, and I always advocate for natural skin care solutions whenever possible. The problem is that many herbs and plants have medicinal properties that are potent enough to cause allergic reactions in some people. You can read more about this here at our Natural Skin Care page.

Challenges Finding Skin Care for Sensitive Skin

One of the challenges of having sensitive skin is that you are very limited in the range of skin care products you can use.

Many hypoallergenic products are created to reduce allergic reactions, but may not be specifically formulated to do a good job on your skin!

If you have sensitive skin AND you want to be beautiful, it is a little more work to find products that are actually effective. So many times I've had to take 'pot luck' in my skin care and personal care products, because most of the ones I tried were hypoallergenic but they didn't really do anything to improve my skin or hair.

It has been a long saga, and thankfully I'm starting to finally get a handle on my sensitive skin. I am also sensitive to fragrance, and it has been very difficult to find products that work for me.

You can read about my difficulties in finding hypoallergenic shampoo, which finally led me to discover hypoallergenic skin care products which actually worked for my skin and begin to heal some of the inflammation and skin breakouts that had been plaguing me.

I am very pleased with how radiant my hair and skin have become since using these!