In this day and age, we have enough to worry about without piling a list of skin products to buy and tasks to complete to achieve healthy, young-looking skin.
That's hands down why adding in a simple, straightforward, no-frills skincare routine for men is essential. After a few weeks, you won't even notice the extra time you've spent, including the most crucial weekly regimen for healthy and robust skin—exfoliation.
So, no, you don't have to be a product enthusiast and run out and buy all the masks, serums, or toners you can find just to have clearer, smoother, blemish-free, and younger-looking skin. You can add a simple exfoliation routine and be done with it.
It is just as important, if not more important, depending on your hobbies and your job, to have an exfoliation routine for your tough working skin.
Focus your efforts on the process and on your baseline. In doing so, you won't add more than a few minutes to your daily routine, but that time spent can take years of hard and aging work right off your skin.
There are five key steps in any successful skincare regimen for men.
We'll cut to the chase and keep it as straightforward as possible while uncovering how to achieve blemish-free, healthy-looking skin. And once you have your tools and technique in place, it is easy sailing, my friend.
Step One - Cleanse your skin.
Get in the habit of washing your body regularly. Remove build-up, dirt, sweat, and grime from your skin daily, especially if you work outside or are exposed to harsh environments. Even if you work in an office, environmental pollutants can build-up on our skin, and exposure to harsh overhead lighting brings its own set of skin problems.
Choose a body wash with a good lather that moisturizes while you clean. Set the faucet temp to warm and make sure you've got a good wet base to start from before you begin exfoliating.
Step Two - Exfoliate every nook and cranny, even the hairy bits.
The majority of our sebum production, the natural oils that skin emits to protect our skin, is produced in our body's hairier regions. This natural oil keeps our skin waterproofed and moisturized, but when it comes in contact with dead skin cell build-up and residual dirt, it can lead to clogged pores, red spots, and even ingrown hairs.
Regular exfoliation will keep skin blemish-free by removing any build-up and dead skin from your pores and sweaty areas. It also smooths out the skin by helping to work through rough patches and keep hair follicles clear. This helps reduce ingrown hairs by removing dead skin and lifting the hair up and away from the follicles so the hair can grow in properly.
Our hands and feet aren't the only places that get rough from avid use. Elbows and knees, and even shoulders and shins can take a beating in our daily lives and become dry, calloused, and covered in rough patches.
Step Three - Play the long game.
A successful routine depends on which type of skin you have and your commitment to the practice. Just like women, men have different skin types to pay attention to while planning your exfoliation routine. The type of skin or combination of skin will be the jumping-off point for planning your routine.
Pay attention to which skin type you have:
- Sensitive
- Normal
- Dry
- Oily
- Combination
Sensitive Skin
Redness, rosacea, red spots, and ingrown hairs plague men with sensitive skin. Start easy with your exfoliation routine and just give it a shot once a week to see how your skin responds before increasing the number of weekly treatments.
You should see results in just a few days after your first treatment, and you'll know it is safe to move forward with more reps.
Normal Skin
Lucky jerks. No, in all seriousness, normal skin is usually free of bumps and is pretty good at self-regulating, but it still suffers from dead skin cell build-up and can use a good sloughing a few times a week.
Normal skin is still susceptible to over-exfoliation so pay attention to how your skin reacts between treatments before diving headfirst.
Dry Skin
Is plagued similarly to sensitive skin but can also suffer from large patches of redness and extreme rough spots. Dry skin should be approached with gentle caution, and you should pay a lot of attention to moisturizer and pressure.
Keep the pressure soft and uniform, don't over scrub rough patches because you think that will help solve the problem faster. Slow and steady wins the race to great skin when it comes to exfoliation.
Oily Skin
Excessive grease build-up, blemishes on shoulders, back, and chest. Oily skin gets a bad wrap, but it is really just your body's way of trying to keep your skin moisturized. Excessive oil production can stem from many different factors; genetics, diet, and exposure all play a part. However, through regular exfoliation and moisturizing, you can actually help your skin begin to self regulate and decrease your oil production.
Moisturizer is the real key here, even though it sounds counterintuitive to put more greasy stuff on your already greasy skin. You need to think of moisturizing as hydration. Oil and water don't mix, but hydrating moisturizers can penetrate deep into the layers of the skin, and your natural oils will help lock that moisture in and won't have such a hard job to do to keep things moisturized.
Combination Skin
It is perfectly natural for the body to have different skin types throughout different areas of the body. The North American continent is covered in a vast array of rugged landscapes, and it doesn't have a bad wrap. Exfoliating combination skin just means you have to pay more attention to the areas that need a bit more smoothing out and be gentle with those that don't.
For combination skin, a good rule of thumb is focusing on your high traffic areas — elbows and knees, legs, and ankles. These are the places where we stretch and bend the skin every day--they naturally produce new skin cells faster, and they are also locations where clothes can rub and cause friction or sweat, and build-up can gather and hide.
Step Four - Find the tool that works for what you want to work out in your skin.
Just like the right set of weights for maintaining or building up your muscle mass, you want to use tools that provide just the right amount of exfoliation for your skin.
Do you go to the gym every week? Do you have leg day three times a week? How bout exfoliation three times a week?
Exfoliation is essentially a workout for your skin. It removes the old cells so the healthy new cells can make their way to the surface and show off all their glowing goodness.
Adding an exfoliation routine into your schedule is your way of adding a one-on-one personal training session with your skin. Over time your skin gets conditioned to the treatment, and you start seeing results.
Here are our favorite exfoliators you can easily add into your routine:
- Super Buffer - a good starter buffer for those with sensitive to dry skin. Just enough exfoliation to get the job done.
- Extreme Buffer - a great weekly routine buffer for those with normal skin. This buffer will put in the extra work on rough spots without added products or pressure.
- Supreme Buffer - oily skin's best friend. A supreme buffer makes light work of greasy build-up, blemishes, and ingrown hairs. It can even shine up those elbows, tired feet, and knees.
These moisturizing body wash-infused body buffers are all 3-in-one products with exfoliation, cleansing, and hydrating action. Talk about simple and straightforward? It really doesn't get any easier than that, my friend.
Step Five - Always moisturize!
We tend to think that lotions are just for the ladies. They have definitely been marketed that way. We get it, guys, but moisturizer is for men too.
Adding a morning facial moisturizer and an evening full-body moisturizing treatment into your skin ready for any test you put it through on an average day.
Moisturized skin is stronger, tougher, and fights harder against environmental pollution than anything else on our bodies. Hydrated skin stands up to the environment and wrinkles.
An exfoliation routine doesn't have to be a long, drawn-out process. It can easily be incorporated into the habits you already have put in place. Investing just a few extra minutes in yourself each week will save you from blemishes, ingrown hairs, and rough, dull patches, and instead gift you with supple, strong, and fit skin.
All bodies deserve to be moisturized, feel younger, and be healthier! Having exfoliated and moisturized skin means happy, more youthful-looking skin for years to come. So what are you waiting for? Get to skin-caring!
Sources:
https://www.byrdie.com/exfoliate-skin-type
https://blog.menscience.com/how-to-exfoliate-mens-exfoliation-dos-and-donts/
