Love from Lois – Chapter 2

Get To Know Your Skin, And Build A Loving Relationship Together

This was originally going to be chapter 1 but rightly so, stress took priority over my desire to start right at the very beginning. So I’m using chapter 2 as the space to give you some basic knowledge for you to understand your own personal skin and its behaviour.

I want you to build a loving, caring relationship with your skin and realise you are in this together. Don’t hate your skin for behaving in a way that’s preventing it from looking young, flawless and perfect. Together, lets try to get to the bottom of YOUR individual skin needs and create a perfect recipe of lifestyle and skin regime to give your skin the best chance to look its best – and stay at its best. After all, the best accessory you will ever own is your skin.

I want to use this chapter to explain the difference between your SKIN CONDITION and your SKIN TYPE, because in my opinion if we use this as our first building block we are laying the essential foundations for your ‘happily ever after’ with your skin.

Your skin CONDITION is the way your skin is behaving right now. It can be something that is changing constantly, particularly if you are a woman. With the correct diet, lifestyle and skin care regime YOU can change your skin condition and make it as healthy as possible, leaving your skin thanking you by looking and feeling as glowing as it possibly can. Off the top of my head, the most common behaviours that fit into your skin CONDITION category are:

Dehydrated

Prematurely ageing

Hormonal

Stressed

Sensitised

Normal

You can be anything from one to all of these conditions mixed together really.

Your skin TYPE is the way your skin genetically behaves, I suppose the best way to explain it is to say your skin type is the skin you are born with. It will tend to stay the same, not necessarily forever, every part of our body changes through different stages of our lives but in general, for large periods of our lives your skin type fits into one category. But the beauty of this is – your skin type can be managed and greatly improved once you have got know your own skin fully.

Ok… so here’s your skin TYPE options:

Dry

Oily

Ageing

Acne Prone

Combination

Sensitive

Normal

Again you can be more than one skin type mixed together for instance you can be dry and ageing or any other of the combinations whether it is two, three or four of them all together!

Every single one of the above skin types and skin conditions really do need their own chapter to fully explain the signs, triggers and solutions. For now this chapter is for you to hopefully understand your own skin a bit better, to understand what you can change compared to what you need to try to work in synergy with, therefore treating it with as much love as it deserves.

So what do you need to do? Simply wake and pay attention to your skin. Your skin is trying to talk to you by the way it’s behaving so try and understand what it’s saying. If something is reoccurring, take a step back for a second, ask yourself… does this particular issue happen after I have eaten something or used a certain product on my skin? Has this occurred at the same time of the month as last time or after I have had a late night or a busy time at work? Once you start asking yourself questions and creating a background to the way your skin is reacting, you are starting to build the foundations of getting to know your own skin.

Im probably best using my skin as an example to hopefully help you to get to know yours: So… my skin feels tight after cleansing no matter how gentle the cleanser is that I use, it always feels ‘thirsty’ (a word I like to use to describe the feeling of needing to moisturise it straight after cleansing.) In my opinion my skin type is DRY. My skin condition can very easily be DEHYDRATED, I can tell this by the very surface of my skin looking thin and if I pinch it together slightly it creates lots of tiny little lines – I am lucky to have worked out the right recipe of products to prevent my skin from being dehydrated the majority of the time. I suffer from VERY open pores, which to me, falls under the PREMATURELY AGEING category and while some advanced skin treatments can help minimise this, only an invasive laser treatment with significant down time will make a dramatic difference. Then to top it off, I think I am quite SENSITISED at the moment because I feel I have over processed my skin by the amount of treatments I’ve been having. I can tell this by my cheeks being red and there being very tiny little thread veins visible when I look at it closely. You really want to avoid over processing your skin through home care and treatments because it can take around 6 weeks for it to repair. Its something I will concentrate on further for you in the future but it is certainly something I shouldn’t have done to myself because I really do know better! The best way to avoid causing this is to make sure you are not over exfoliating. You may be surprised how many of your products are actually exfoliating your skin, it is often not just your exfoliator. Fully read the description of what each of your products is dong for you, then if you are going for a skin treatment, perhaps avoid exfoliating at home for one or two days before.

I appreciate you will probably feel unsure on how to give yourself a skin type label confidently  so after having a read of this chapter pop over to my skin guide on the website. It will allow you to click a number of questions which will result in giving you a general idea of what your skin type is and if anyone wants a free, more personal consultation please get in touch I am more than happy to give you one via email, FaceTime or Zoom.

If you feel like you need some face to face advice from a skin care professional even if is just to find out how your skin is behaving then go for it! Have a look out for reputable Skin Clinics, Medispas and Aesthetics Practitioners in your area. In my opinion, these are the people and places that you will receive the most valid advice. Aesthetic Practitioners have a vast amount of training under their belt and Skin Clinics and Medispas are more likely to house therapists at Skin Expert level. I would be wary of going to department stores and asking particular skin care brand staff for advice as they are very often trained in their brand products and that only. They are very often not actually trained in skin.

Whilst I’m on the subject of Skin professionals and treatments, I am very often asked by clients how often they should get a skin treatment. The best answer is – as often as your time and finances will allow you to spare really. If you want to see some very drastic changes in your skin, certain invasive treatments or peels are best carried out as a course but they will all be agreed by consultation with yourself and your therapist. As a general rule of thumb for me, if you have a good home care routine daily, then having a really good skin treatment once a month is going to give your skin a lovely boost. When we are young, our skins full cell renewal cycle is around 28 days and as we age that full renewal process takes longer and longer. Monthly treatments to encourage out skin to renew at our younger 28 day cycle is really is going to do wonders for your skin!

In time I will go through as many skin treatment options as I can for you, explaining each treatment process, the benefits, average costs in your area, who’s skin they are best suited to and the kind of results you should expect. But in my opinion we’ve got some ground work to put in place before fully divulging into your treatment options.

Have the confidence to know your own likes and dislikes with regards to products and make sure you have the chance to feel them on your skin before investing money in the product. Either book in for a facial that uses the products you are interested in, or find a Skin Clinic that has the products available as testers for you to try or samples for you to take home. Regardless of what is recommended to you, what is more important than anything else is that the products result in your skin looking and feeling how YOU want it to look.

I strongly recommend that you choose to start investing in your skin and treating it as a priority, regardless of your age. If you are young – this is the best time to start!! If you are middle aged and start now, it can mean the difference of you looking 50 when you are really 60. If you are older than middle aged it still isn’t too late! I promise that every little bit of care towards your skin will help it look and FEEL better and lets face it, regardless how old you are.. when someone compliments you on your skin, it is NEVER going to do anything other than make you feel a little bit better.

My dad said to me recently ‘by the time you are 40 you have the skin that you deserve’ which I thought was interesting coming from him considering I don’t think a single product has ever touched his face, but I think from his perspective he was more referring to diet and lifestyle. Back in the olden days or actually ‘not so long ago’ days, my dad’s statement was probably a lot more true. But now, the treatments and home care products are so advanced that you really can turn back time (to a certain extent). When considering how carelessly we may have treated our skin when we were younger, you havn’t ever left it too late to make improvements.

Hopefully what I am helping you to understand is no matter what we have done in the past, and how wonderfully we have lived our lives that may have consequently led us to neglect our skin, we CAN make improvements and in a lot of peoples cases, those improvements can be huge, as long as you get to know your skin fully and allow me to educate you on how to create a loving relationship with it.

Remember one of my favourite sayings – Be Your Own Kind Of Beautiful. Your skin is as individual as you are. Appreciate your skin for trying its best, because it really is trying its best, and lets give it all the help we can 🙂

Love from Lois xxx