Mark another one on the chalk board for team oils, girls! In the September issue of Elle there’s a whole feature devoted to revealing to the readers that oils (oils!) can actually reverse the excesses of, you know, excessive skin care.
The piece’s author is one of those product junkies—hey, we can relate—whose multi-layered, supposedly multitasking, 100-step skin care routine has left her skin worse for wear: red, irritated, and congested beyond belief. So she heads to a derm in search of help. From the piece:
She basically goes on a major product detox, replacing her chem-laden crap with gentle, skin-friendly oils instead. And guess what? Her skin calms down. Ahhh.
This article reminded me of some very stupid behavior of my own back when I was a product hound. I must have been 26 or 27 when a very old woman (who’d clearly had several facelifts) working at a fancy beauty store convinced me and my even younger, baby-faced, wrinkle-free friend that we must—MUST—start using glycolic acid NOW. In our twenties. Otherwise, we would be in big trouble. We should also never, ever, under any circumstances go in the sun. And we should change our pillowcases every night and wash them after one use (with toxic laundry detergent, no doubt). Of course, I ate up this advice.
I applied the glycolic acid as instructed, slowly building up my tolerance to several applications a week. My skin looked… dewy, I thought. Definitely my pores were smaller. At any rate it would prevent me from aging, I told myself. Then I went snowboarding one weekend and my skin turned a color of tomato red I’d never seen before on a face. I kept using the glycolic though. Duh, it was making me younger. But before long, I had—rosacea maybe? Hard to say, but my skin was angry and irritated and red and bumpy, and I’m not exaggerating when I say that it took years (and a whole lot of natural oils) to reverse the damage I’d done.
Needless to say I’m thrilled to see Elle telling this skin detox story. The whole article isn’t online, but I did find this link to product recs.
Did any of you engage is these charming burn methods? Were the results fab or frightening?
