Beautiful Lemongrass and Sage Olive Oil Soap from Batty's Bath

I recently made the mistake of taking a quick saunter down the beauty aisle of the grocery store. I have been pretty tight on time lately, and the soap situation in the shower was becoming situation critical. I was down to my last sliver.

Since both my skin and nose are super sensitive to artificial “natural” fragrance, soap and body wash purchases are a little tricky and I generally use all natural or handcrafted products. So to purchase via Stop & Shop meant that things were getting desperate.

I settled on something that I felt would be the least noxious, Ivory. 99 and 1/100ths or whatever pure! I used it when I was a baby! When Manly Man Husband saw it in the bag, he groaned and refused to use it.

About a week after using it, the skin on my upper arms started getting dry and flaky, and Manly Man Husband taunted me with a chorus of “I told you sos.”

Yup, Ivory was completely drying me out (and itchy too). Commercial soap is not soap. It’s detergent. And detergent and skin just aren’t friends.

Yesterday, I came across this excellent post by Jamie, who runs Batty’s Bath, a lovely handmade soap company that you can find on Etsy. Want to know how commercial soap is different from hand-crafted? Check out her post.

You will never look at Ivory the same again! 99 and whatever percent pure my ass.

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.

Did you know that a lot of esthetician’s try new product lines and treatments out on themselves first? Sounds so nice, doesn’t it? Until your glycolic peel leaves you scabbed.

Luckily, it was not me. But a fellow esthetician tried out a fairly low percentage glycolic that left her scabbed. In trying to deduce why the peel did that (and she is the peel queen so it had nothing to do with lack of experience), it came up that her skin was probably sensitized to the acid, which created the reaction. She peels every other week or so, and uses AHAs in her basic skin care routine, so the glycolic was just too much for her skin.

I am not saying that your product is going to scab you–that’s really extreme–but sometimes when you have been using the same product with the same ingredients over time, your skin rebels.

The moisturizer you once loved to pieces may just not work as effectively anymore. That’s your skin saying ho hum.

Or you suddenly experience a lot of redness and sensitivity to a serum you have used faithfully for years. This happens a lot with AHA products. That’s your skin saying, no no more, I can’t take it anymore!

So you need to move on. Give your skin a break. Try a new line, try new active ingredients–don’t go from one Vitamin C product to another, try one with Pomegranate power instead.

I recommend switching up your products at least twice a year, late spring and late fall, to protect it from different weather extremes. How often do switch it up?

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.