it Hurts Everyone I started my career as a cosmetics consumer advocate by warning women about the dam­age being done to their skin by using irritating skin-care ingredients that trigger chronic inflammation when used day in and day out. Over the years my fears about irritation and the resulting inflammation it causes have been reconfirmed […]

Ideally, you should be using products that don’t create or reinforce undesirable skin types. Among the offending products are bar soaps and bar cleansers (both can artificially make skin dry and irritated), occlusive moisturizers (these can clog pores and make breakouts worse), and skin-care products that contain irritating ingredients (causing redness, inflammation, and flaking), including […]

Regardless of skin color or ethnic background, all skin is subject to a range of problems. Almost always these skin problems have nothing to do with skin color or ethnic background. Whether it is dry or oily skin, blemishes, scarring, wrinkles, skin discolorations, skin dis­orders, skin sensitivity, or even risk of sun damage, all men […]

Older skin is different from younger skin; that is indisputable. Yet it is a mistake to buy skin-care products based on a nebulous age category. Treating older or younger skin with products supposedly aimed at dealing with specific age ranges does not make sense because not everyone with “older” or “younger” skin has the same […]

More than 60% of women worldwide feel they have sensitive skin (Sources: Skin Research and Technology, November 2006, pages 217-222; and British Journal of Dermatology, August 2001, pages 258-263), and though many physicians feel that this is at best an exaggera­tion, the truth is these women do have sensitive skin and I would suspect the […]

One other important point: The skin-care products you use can influence your skin type. Judging skin type simply by looking at your face and feeling your skin won’t necessarily identify the underlying situation. For example, if you use an emollient cleanser and follow it with a drying, alcohol-laden toner, and then an emollient moisturizer with […]

Another limitation of skin type is that it cannot address skin-care needs that may not be apparent on the skin’s surface. For example, sun damage is not evident when you are younger, but sun protection is imperative for all skin types. Oily and dry skin present at the same time, along with some redness, may […]

Identifying your skin type is made a lot more difficult by the all-encompassing combina­tion skin type. Almost everyone at some time or another, if not all the time, has combination skin. Physiologically, the nose, chin, center of the forehead, and the center of the cheek all have more oil glands than other parts of the […]

It depends on how you define normal. As far as the cosmetics industry is concerned, every woman can and should have normal skin. Yet acquiring normal skin is like trying to scale a peak with a slippery, precarious slope. At some point you are going to take a wrong step. And if you have normal […]