About 5 weeks ago I spilled water on my modem. It’s just for the phone. The router for the internet was underneath
and suffered no damage. I unhooked the
phone modem to air it out, and after shaking it out a bit and seeing no
droplets, plugged it back in and went about my day.
After an hour or so, I smelled something
funny. I ignored it because it was so
damp outside, I thought maybe something from coming from outside, and my salon
was so filled with the beautiful smells of aromatherapy, I thought nothing of
it.
When the day was almost over, I came out of my last facial
and saw smoke coming from the modem. OK
! Unplugged it right away, put it aside
and thought, well, I never really answer the phone anyway, so I’ll just call
Comcast when I have time and they’ll bring over a new modem. I do pretty much everything by email, and even encourage my clients on my web site and voice mail to email for a faster response. Not that I discourage phone calls, it's just I'm either at my computer or with a client all day long. As long as I can call from my cell for messages,
what’s the harm?
Yeah. That was 6 weeks ago. I finally called Comcast yesterday. “You pay a monthly equipment fee, you
know.” Oh. *sigh* oy vey (face meet palm).
So yes, I do a WHOLE lot by email. Half of my professional life is spent online
as a Skincare Coach specializing in Adult Acne and Sensitivity.
My service is even called “Eval by Email®”. That is how I notice so profoundly when I get
more emails asking a specific question at any time of the year, and how it can
be enough to write an entire blog post about it.
Question: Now that
it’s getting into summer, do I have to change any of my products?
Before I answer yes or no, I have to ask the client a few
questions :
- Do you tend to get more oily in the summer?
- Do you work out more in the summer, or do you just change venue like being outside more?
- Do you tend to break out more in the summer (which is not a no-brainer, since there are people, like me, who actually break out less in the summer and more in the winter due to more frequent washing plus higher humidity).
There are skincare experts who say unequivocally, yes, you
need to change your skincare routine each season, but I don’t believe that’s
necessarily true. So how do you know if
you should, and if you should, what do you need to change ?
Cleanser
There is one simple way that I can tell what cleanser to
recommend to anyone at any given time :
After washing in the morning, what time of day do you start
to see shine or oiliness on your face?
The shorter the wait time, the stronger the cleanser has to
be (without stripping, of course), the longer the wait time the more likely the
person needs a lotion cleanser rather than a gel one.
However, I also have to take into account
exactly how much oiliness they experience.
For instance, if they get just a little oily but start to experience
this early in the day, this tells me their skin is actually extremely
dehydrated, and the source of their breakouts could be backed-up oil and dead
skin cells creating impactions that have to be loosened up by increased
hydration in their skincare.
But when
the wait time changes, this is still how we gauge what cleanser you need at any
given time.
In the summertime, just about everyone with oily skin
experiences an increase in oil production.
Heat, heightened activity level, heightened humidity level, all these
can make oily skin feel far more uncomfortable than it does in wintertime. But we cannot assume that this means an
increase in breakouts. It can, but
sometimes it doesn’t.
I always had much
better skin in the summer because I was more likely to wash my face
consistently, and I would take the oil of my skin mid afternoon and literally
wipe it all over my face with clean hands.
Here’s a video of exactly how I did that!
So, it can be necessary for someone with very oily skin to
change their cleanser for summer to something even stronger, and for someone
with much less oil to have to change from a lotion cleanser used in the winter
to a gentle gel cleanser. Let’s put it
this way – I provide samples for a reason. 😊 But having said that, I do have many clients
who use the same cleanser throughout the year.
Lotion
Whether someone changes from an SPF of 15 in the winter to
and SPF of 30 in the summer all depends on outdoor activity level only, so I
actually won’t touch on that, simply because the hydration and moisturization
levels of the SPF lotions I carry in my web store are right for all
seasons.
So, I’d rather talk about nighttime lotions, since what
we’re really concerned with is whether the skin is getting enough hydration,
whether the skin needs barrier repair and/or reduction of inflammation to heal
that particular acne problem. Anti-aging needs will have to be taken into account with Adult Acne as well.
When it comes to oily skin, the real difference between a
lotion that will be productive and one that will bring disadvantage will be how
much it hydrates vs. how much it lubricates.
Sometimes even an acne skin will need to have lipids and fats replaced
that have been lost due to aging and sun damage. That's something that has to be determined with individual skincare coaching.
It can also be a matter of “heavy” vs.
“light”, though too often that doesn't describe the skin's needs very well. There are some really cool products and routines that can
actually help the skin reduce its oil production over time while increasing
hydration. This is one of the main
strategies in my method of Adult Acne treatment!
So how do you know if you need to switch? We can go back to the question of what time
of day your skin starts to get oily after washing in the morning. We not only have to determine how oily your
skin is but how dehydrated it is as well.
Do we need to take the oil level down and do we need to bring the hydration
level up? Let's figure that out together!
Fill out my Eval by Email® Online Skincare Consultation form
designed for Adults 24+ living anywhere in the USA !
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