Essential steps for proper skin care

With all the different skin care products on the market, it’s easy to get confused and overwhelmed by all the choices.

Here are some tips for the basics of good skin care:

Cleanse:

Your skin should be cleaned gently and regularly, and then treated with care afterwards–don’t dry out! Never go to bed with out removing your make-up and always wash again in the morning.

Exfoliate:

Reduce excess oil with a gentle exfoliant that provides vitamins for your skin. A good exfoliant cleans your skin and calms it down by exfoliating dead skin cells and removing dirt. Produce new, undamaged skin cells with gentle, not rough, cleansing.

Stimulate:

Ingredients such as retinol and amino acids stimulate cellular function and growth. This renews the look of your skin, keeping it firm. After cleansing, treat your fresh, clean skin with a moisturizing stimulant. Stimulating your skin to have new cell activity is essential to reducing damage, preventing wrinkles, and achieving a healthy glow.

Prevention: 

Protect yourself from the damaging rays of the sun, without the need for a greasy and heavy sunscreen. Use a light cream with UVA/UVB protection before you go outside to prevent sun damage and wrinkles, all the while moisturizing your skin.

Calm and Nourish:

Before bed, use a night cream to firm up puffiness around your eyes and other tired lines. Use creams with calming agents to prevent inflammation and relax your skin overnight. Keeping your skin well-nourished is the key to maintaining elasticity and preventing wrinkles.

Summer Skin! Beat the Heat

Summertime means beaches, parks, and pools. However, to your face it means three things: sun, heat, and sweat. Don’t fret–you can easily deal with the elements by following some simple rules to keep your skin looking its best and face the summer heat head-on.

As sun damage is the #1 cause of wrinkles, purposefully tanning is to be avoided. You can, however, use a tinted moisturizer to achieve the summer glow without the damaging affects of long exposure to direct sun. An oil-free, UVA/UVB protected tinted moisturizer will keep you looking tanned and fresh all summer, while keeping your skin supple and burn-free.

Dermatologists’ Best Tips

Oil-free sunscreen

•  Sunscreen should be worn on your face year round, rain or shine. Look for an oil-free SPF 30 face sunscreen to protect from the sun without clogging your pores. Remember to reapply every few hours to be protected the whole day through. You won’t regret it!

Reduce Redness

•  Soak a clean cloth in cold water and wring out. Apply the cold cloth to your neck to reduce blood-flow to the face and causing redness. This also helps to reduce chronic flushing and redness that will stay in the face.

Dry Skin

•  As sweating produces more oils in the skin, you may feel compelled in summer to cleanse your face more often. Avoid over-cleansing, however, as this will cause flaking and cracking of the skin. Over-cleansing also tells your body to produce more oil, actually causing the oil buildups that lead to breakouts. Combat this by having a consistent and regular routine of cleansing and moisturizing to keep that excess dirt from building up in the summer. Use a small amount of mild cleanser to remove the oils, and an exfoliant once or twice a week to remove dead skin cells and encourage growth of new cells. Pat your face dry with a clean cloth! Rubbing aggravates your delicate skin and undermines the work of using a gentle cleanser.

Oily Skin

•  Caring for oily skin has a lot in common with treating dry skin, especially in the summer. The main thing to keep in mind is consistency. Be delicate with your skin and cleanse regularly. As the hot summer does encourage more sweat production, oil buildup is more common. Don’t be tempted to moisturize less if you feel your skin is oily, rather use a consistent amount of oil-free moisturize to keep your oil-production stabilized. As always, avoid the desire to touch your face with your hands, as our hands carry a lot of oil and dirt on them. Keep your hair off your face if possible by tying it back in a nice bun or ponytail.

Peel

•  To deal with summer shininess, consider a chemical peel. Chemical peels will aid with discoloration, new skin cell production, and draw out excess oil–leaving skin with less of that unwanted summer shine.

Treat your burns

•  Finally, if you do get burned, dermatologists recommend reducing the inflammation as the key to avoiding skin damage. Take an aspirin or ibuprofen to reduce swelling and treat with a cool cloth.

Have fun in the sun!

The importance of medical grade skin care

We live in Calgary, with one of the harshest climates in the world. When winter arrives, it’s as if an enormous vacuum has sucked up all the humidity in the area. The harsh weather and heated buildings seem to collaborate to rob skin of moisture. Our skin and lips immediately begin to dry and crack. Although we can’t emphasize enough the importance of regular skin care throughout the year with a medical grade skin care line, it’s even more important in the winter.

Why?

They’re far superior to over-the-counter products for these reasons:

• Higher concentrations of active ingredients than over-the-counter products
• Real results: Scientifically tested and published in medical journals

In our harsh climate, it’s essential to ensure you are using the best products available to protect and moisture your skin.

Medical grade products also:

• Enhance and prolong cosmetic surgery procedure results
• Increase collagen and elastin production, reducing fine lines and wrinkles and decreasing hyperpigmentation resulting in ongoing skin transformation.

Over-the-counter products are:

• Not formulated in a way to penetrate below the skin’s surface
• Contain many chemical agents, which can irritate sensitive
• Not able to treat the underlying skin condition which results in the obvious signs of aging

Although they may seem more expensive initially, a little goes a long way with a medical grade product.

Sagging Skin

There are many benefits to attaining a certain age—wisdom, maturity and patience come to mind. Then there’s the side of getting older that’s less appealing—sagging skin.

Skin loses its firmness eventually, a natural effect of aging because of collagen breakdown and loss. Plastic surgery, until recently, was the only solution for skin tightening. For many, it wasn’t an option because of the expense, potential complications and downtime.

How to you fight sagging skin?

To improve skin tone, it’s necessary to increase collagen production. Recent advances in procedures to fight aging skin include the use of lasers to stimulate the production of collagen.

Skin Tightening Lasers can treat:

• face
• jawline
• chin
• neck
• abdomen
• back of upper arms

Problem areas can be targeted with lasers, and there’s little to no downtime depending on the type of laser treatment. Lasers are also non-invasive, no surgery or injections are involved.

Don’t Let Menopause Upset Your Amazing Skin

What’s more fun than dealing with extra-dry skin while you get pimples you haven’t seen since you were in public school? These seemingly polar reactions to your changing hormones require a kind, consistent, but super-simple regime. Menopause–just when you’re on the top of your game against aging skin, this heavy weight champion comes in to knock you down a few pegs. Don’t fret. You and your skin are more capable than ever, and dealing with the one-two punch of menopause on your skin may be more simple than you expect.

Fine lines and wrinkles are part of the aging process, but this doesn’t mean you have to succumb to them - Britannia Dermedics offers a variety of wrinkle and fine line treatments in Calgary.

Hydrate:

Your body needs water, and your skin loves it. A decrease in estrogen during menopause can let testosterone affect your pore size. Water will flush out the bad sugars, dirt, and oils that you may be more susceptible to, which aggravate healthy cell production and create extra oil. Dry skin can be caused externally by sun exposure or too much wind, but is typically an indicator of dehydration.

Cleanse:

A medical grade cleanser will remove the excess oil from your skin without also drying you.

Moisturize:

Use of a light but effective sunscreen is essential to keeping a good relationship with your skin throughout menopause. If your skin is driving you mad, a light protective layer applied at least a few times a day actively works hard to prevent more aging and dry agitation from occurring. Avoid anything too oily as the influence of testosterone during menopause is already adding extra oils.

At night, use a cream that encourages collagen production, such as SkinTx’s Retinol SR Facial Treatment. The decrease of estrogen in menopause causes the skin to sag, as less collagen is being produced. Retinoids prevent collagen breakdown.

Skin care during menopause is a focus on just that–skin care.

Don’t Stress About It: Improving Skin Quality by Relaxing

Relaxation is something worthwhile to bring into your skin care routine. Acne, hives, rashes may not always come from stress or anxiety, but worry can play a major role in declining skin quality. Here are some tips on how to relax to improve skin quality while improving your day-to-day.

Hives

In a way, it starts with hives. Stress, anxiety, or nervousness sends blood pumping at a high-rate through your body, often bursting from pressure, or showing up in sensitive and thin areas of your skin–hands, neck, chest, and face.  Hives are irritated skin that can turn into pimples, or persistent acne.

Sweating

Increased sweating dehydrates the skin and leaves it vulnerable to dryness, irritation, peeling, and a quicker road to wrinkles.

Wake up Right

Interestingly, one of the best things you can do for your skin is centering yourself–no creams necessary. Get up in the morning and start with 15-30 minutes of alone time–no phones or computers. Become aware of the room, and focus on breathing and stretching out your limbs. Giving yourself that extra time to be alone in the morning can help you think clearly throughout the day and dramatically reduce stress.

Sleep Right

Being calmer throughout the day will help you get that beauty sleep you need. A good, regular sleep is essential to your skin’s nightly reparations, building up a barrier and providing your skin with all the hydration and collagen it needs to be plump, healthy, and happy in the morning.

Think about it–30 minutes in the morning can improve a lifetime of skin.

Undo Summer Damage

Unless you’ve stayed inside all summer, you’ve likely accumulated some sun damage over the last few months. With fall just around the corner, it’s time to think about undoing that damage. One of the most effective methods is with an IPL or Intense Pulsed Light treatment, which improves skin tone and removes freckles and brown spots without pain or surgery. Skin texture, lesions, and age or liver spots are treated with an intense but painless light that gets straight to the affected area without damaging skin.

How IPL works

The affected areas of the skin on the damaged areas are heated using a painless, concentrated light, which diffuses redness and brown spots in the top layer of your skin to even out and improve quality.

With IPL, wavelengths of light are absorbed by the top layer of your skin, altering pigment to return it to a more youthful, and even skin tone. Low contrast or light brown spots, which previously were difficult to remove or improve, respond well to IPL treatments.

What areas does iPL treat?

Along with treating aging or redness on the face, IPL commonly treats:

• Hands
• Chest
• Arms
• Shoulders

What skin problems does iPL treat?

• Freckles
• Photo damage
• Hyper pigmentation
• Brown spots
• Rosacea

How long does an iPL treatment take?

An IPL treatment is non-invasive and will not interrupt your routine or require extensive recovery time. Treatment plans are designed to treat your goals; depending on the amount of damage, you may need more than one treatment. The best results are usually seen with three to five treatments.

Sunscreen In Winter

Should you wear it? Absolutely. It’s as easy to get sunburned and accumulate sun damage in the winter as in summer. Even if it the temperatures are in the minus range, you can still get a sunburn as the snow reflects the sun’s rays.

We think snow and ice should come with UV warnings as they can reflect up to 80 percent of UV rays. These rays cause skin cancer but are also the culprit behind about 90 percent of all your wrinkles.

For all you outdoor winter sports enthusiasts, it’s essential to remember windburn and sunburn give a double whammy, leaving your skin dry and agitated. The more elevated the slopes, the higher your sun exposure

What if it’s a cloudy day?

UV rays can work their way through just about anything—with the exception of freshly applied sunblock. About 80 percent of the sun’s rays can pass through clouds.

What SPF should I wear?

According to the American Academy of Dermatology, SPF 15 blocks 93 percent of UVB rays, while SPF 30 blocks 97 percent; SPF 50, 98 percent; and SPF 100, 99 percent, according to the American Academy of Dermatology. The higher the SPF, the smaller the difference becomes. Whatever your sunscreen’s SPF number, it’s effective for the same amount of time. You should reapply every two hours.

Wear sunscreen under your clothes

Most of your clothing provides very little sun protection. A standard white T-shirt packs an SPF value of about 7—and if it’s wet, the SPF can go down as low as 3, according to the Skin Cancer Foundation. While the darker and thicker the clothing, the more protection it provides, the hotter it is, too.

Your best bet: Also apply sunscreen where the sun don’t shine.