Each week, we’ll answer your beauty-related questions, even the dumb ones.
1. My biggest beauty question is: How in the world do I stop my lips from drying out and peeling all the damn time? It’s not a seasonal thing, it’s constant. I’ve tried various lip balms with no real success. I’d like to more regularly incorporate lipsticks/stains/tars etc into my makeup routine, but it’s hard to wear lip stuff confidently when my lips are always dried out.
Drink water. Drink water! Drink so much water. How much water are you drinking? Double it. Your’e going to get a nickname at work that references how often you pee, but it’ll be worth it.
Also, do you bite your lips? You may not even notice you’re doing it, but you could be making the problem worse by mindlessly gnawing at the flakes.
I’ll give you a three part daily routine that works for me.
- Exfoliate. You can do this by rubbing a mixture of sugar and olive oil on your lips, or scrub them with your toothbrush. Don’t go nuts, but about 30 seconds of rubbing should do it. Rinse.
- Moisturize. During the day, use a highly moisturizing lip balm. This is going to be something that is not petrolatum-based. Just slap it on whenever you think of it.
- Protect. At night, before bed, apply something that is petrolatum-based, like Vaseline or Smith’s Rosebud Salve. This will keep your lips from losing moisture as you sleep.
Try this for a week or two before giving up. Eventually, you won’t have to be quite so diligent and you can start wearing some of those fun lip products you covet.
2. So I am 27 and finally starting to get a handle on grown woman beauty regimen (I think?). However, I’m starting to look critically at my face – oily in some places, visible pores spreading across my nose and cheeks, the start of fine lines around my mouth. Should I be implementing some kind of professional level care from time to time, like a facial or a peel or something? Is this a thing that regular people generally do?
To answer your first question, you can implement something, sure. I love getting facials but did you know they are kind of bullshit? I mean, ack, I mean, sorry to all aestheticians, but without adding some sort of medical-grade procedure on top like a peel, a facial is kind of weak. They are a nice way of relaxing and feeling exfoliated and getting your blackheads squeezed is fun, but for the money you’re unlikely to see the kind of change you can get from something a bit more intense.
Ask a dermatologist or nurse at a med spa to tell you all about glycolic peels. They can be administered every few weeks and sold in sets of three or six, or more depending on the strength and your needs. With these, there’s little to no downtime — you can get them and go back to work and probably no one will say shit — and they’re not likely to cause side effects like discoloration. If you don’t ever have to leave the house, a TCA peel is wonderful, too, but there’s a longer healing time and your face basically falls off. If all this peel talk is scary, you might also look into microdermabrasion (though I’ve never personally felt the results were anything to blog about).
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