Would you wash your face with a Brillo pad?

That’s exactly what I thought when I finally pulled out the March issue from the unread stack of Allure magazines sitting next to my bed. The article that caught my attention, called “Tried and True,” was a piece on what beauty editors use on their own skin.

One of Allure’s editors uses the prescription strength retinoid Renova nightly. And every other night, she uses a 10% glycolic at-home peel. Plus, she puts the Renova on 30 minutes after the peel. It makes my skin burn just thinking about this.

She must have skin like leather, because Kids, there is way too much irritation and exfoliation going on. I don’t like the idea of a 10% at home glycolic mixed with an Rx strength retinoid. It just goes way against my better judgment.

Both Renova and glycolic are super irritating to skin. And glycolic is a “degreasing” agent, which means it eats away your skin’s oil. Prescription Vitamin A formulations are super exfoliating, and you can experience redness and flaking when you use them. To put both of them together, and it could over strip your skin of its natural barrier function, leaving skin dry, damaged and chronically inflamed.

Careful estheticians require peel candidates to stay off their Rx Vitamin A topicals for a certain amount of time before they will peel a client. And peeling more than once a week is incredibly excessive. When we do a peel series for clients, they are generally spaced out anywhere between two and four weeks, depending on what we are treating. Even a weekly peel doesn’t give your skin time to repair.

The cover tag for the Allure article was “Get Great Skin.” Based on this Allure editor’s personal regime, the only thing you’d get is damaged skin.

Oh Allure! Why do you break my heart? I always rip open the new issue when it arrives, anxious to read the “beauty bible” and am always so disappointed. The March issue came this morning, and the cover tag of “Stressed Out Skin?” pulled me in, only to hurt me within the very first paragraph.

In analyzing the skin of our over stressed masses, writer Sarah Van Boven says “Not only does stress cause our sebaceous glands to pump out more of the oil that bacteria thrive on…” Or, Oil = bad. 

Oil on our skin, for the most part, is a good thing. We need it to help kill the bacteria on our skin (oil=acid; bacteria cannot thrive in an acidic environment). However, there is one more piece to the acne puzzle. Oxygen. The problem is when the pore gets clogged by dead skin and dirt and oxygen cannot reach the bacteria to help kill it. Oil alone is not the sole culprit.

Strip away that oil and you will have to read the Sensitivity part of this article: “The epidermal barrier that locks moisture to the skin is the same thing that keeps irritants like pollution, allergens and chemicals out.” Guess what that epidermal barrier is? The one you just stripped away because of your acne.

I suppose I should learn by now not to get so excited when the damn magazine shows up.  But it’s kind of like porn. Excited by the promise yet ultimately deflated by the actual experience.