Beauty 101: How To Make Sense Of Your Skin

Skin care products are always covered in insane buzzwords. Anti-aging, combination skin, firming, retinol, revitalize, etc, etc. You’d need a dictionary to figure out the average department store lotion. But no more! Thanks to this week’s Beauty 101.

Today we want to focus on the language of skincare. According to beauty magazines, there are all different “types” of skin. Sometimes, skin is categorized by moisture—or lack thereof. Hence the dry, oily, combination breakdown. Sometimes they describe skin according to “tones.” You might be cool, or warm, or olive, or rosy. And I’m sure there are a dozen other “types” I’m completely leaving out.

In order to better understand our skin and how we (or more accurately, they) talk about it, we turn to you, our readers. Here are a few things we want to know:

How do you recognize and categorize your skin type?
How do different beauty products work on different “types” of skin?
What products work best on dry, oily, or combination skin?
Does putting a piece of white paper up to your face actually help you decide what your “tone” is? If not, how do you figure out your skin tone?
What are the best products (and the best colors) for your skin tone?
What do all the weird buzzwords on my moisturizer/body scrub/face wash really mean? (Bonus points if you can provide a Real Science answer!)

Think you can help decipher skincare lingo? Please leave your tips and tricks and product recommendations in the comments. A roundup of your answers will be posted tomorrow.