Beautiful Lockdown: Top tips for maintaining beauty during quarantine.
The closure of our beloved aesthetic clinics, longer online delivery times, lack of outdoor exposure and potential lockdown bad habits, such as binging and drinking alcohol, is taking its toll on our beauty maintenance programmes.
Wrinkled animal photos, circulated widely across our social media platforms, jest at what people are going to look like when they emerge from isolation. However, it is not all doom and gloom. I have some key lockdown tips and tricks which can help us nourish our skin, keep ageing at bay and keep us feeling confident and beautiful during lockdown. And they are simple, achievable and easy. Let’s get our lockdown beauty vibes on!
Now, the first few tips are free and easy. However, that doesn’t mean they do not help keep wrinkles and ageing at bay. We are sold on the idea that you have to rub a formula of some concoction to achieve the best outcomes, and whilst many topical agents do help, good outcomes can be achieved by just boosting our internal health. These first beauty boosting behaviours are often the first to be forgotten by people, so let us remember these amazing tactics.
Hydration.
The start point for everyone is good hydration and it is the most important, natural, go-to-method to help reduce fine line appearance and improve skin firmness and rigidity. We have tiny molecules in our skin, called hyaluronic acid, that lock in water and act as little pockets of hydration, giving the skin firmness and a hydrated glow. This is a great strategy as well for those of us wanting to improve the appearance of the under-eye area.
Aiming for 2-3L of water a day is good enough hydration for most people. However, drinking diuretic drinks such as tea, coffee or alcohol, can trick the body into losing more water, and so we have to make sure it is 2-3L of water and not of fluids in general.
Dry lips, dry skin or dull looking skin can all be a sign that we are not well hydrated. With the warmer weather arriving, and potential to lose more fluid, be sure not ignore this tip during this spring/summer lockdown.
Sleep.
I know it seems quite obvious, but good sleep hygiene is essential to help improve the appearance of the skin, and especially the skin under the eyes. We don’t fully understand why we sleep so much, but the fact that it made us vulnerable for so many hours during the night means that, to have evolved such a risky behaviour, it must be biochemically valuable. We do know it is essential for tidying up brain connections. We also know a poor sleep or a lack of sleep impacts the appearance of our skin and under eye region. Sleep, it seems is mysteriously pretty essential for our detoxification processes to occur. Chronic lack of sleep can lead to deeper line and wrinkle formation as we limit the detoxification ability of the skin. Aiming for 8 hours sleep a night should do the trick. There are many studies also that suggest the hours before 12am are much more beneficial for sleep than the hours that follow. So, an early night, rather than a cheeky lie in would be the gold standard.
Ditch the Washcloth.
Using a wash cloth to wash the face can be detrimental to your skin health. Although a wash cloth can help with exfoliation (if used lightly) and offer a ‘nice experience’, they can easily harbour bacteria within their finely woven structures. When damp and moist, wash cloths can provide bacteria with the perfect environment to settle and multiply. Bacteria multiply remarkably fast and usually within 20-30mins. Therefore, after 24 hours, there soon could be a germ metropolis living in the fibres of your flannel.
If this is not washed after every use, it is easy to introduce these bacteria into the skin, particularly if you firmly use the cloth for exfoliation. If your health or immunity is compromised, this could actually lead to infection, but more often to not it’s a chance for bacterial settlers to settle in those blocked pours, resulting in the feared acne.
Exfoliation is great for the skin, but if mechanical exfoliation is done to vigorously or too often, as can happen easily with a wash cloth, then it can lead to inflammation and irritation in the skin, resulting in poorer skin health and appearance.
If you are still adamant at using a wash cloth then make sure:
1. It is a soft, gentle material.
2. Use a freshly cleaned wash cloth each time you wash your face.
3. Always wash them on a high wash to help kill bacteria.
4. Try not to heavily use fabric conditioners and fragrant detergents when washing as the face is sensitive and can easily react to these chemicals.
Nourish the skin with nutrients.
Again, this tip is often forgotten. We will readily invest a large part of our earnings in the latest beauty cream and are coming around to choosing nutrient rich products, but the oral route is just as good, if not better at absorption. If we take our nutrients orally and not just focus on applying them locally, via a cream then we benefit all of the skin, but also all of the tissues in the body as well. This is really easy to achieve, often cheaper, especially if you are getting these nutrients from good quality food in the first place.
So, what nutrients should we look out for to keep our skin looking in tip top condition and to slow down ageing processes at a cellular level?
Vitamins A, C and E are powerful antioxidants and the skin uses them to help to neutralise toxins that build up from our external environments and excessive sun exposure. They are essential and you will often find these ingredients in skin care products. However, taking them orally is a more effective and should be added into any skin care regime and not forgotten. There are countless other health benefits of these nutrients as well, so it is a win, win situation. Let us also not forget that vitamin C is needed for collagen production.
Plants are a great source of these vital nutrients, but organic, grass fed meats/diary, and wild caught fish, can be great sources too.
Other antioxidants and minerals that activate antioxidants, that should be on your radar, are selenium, alpha lipoic acid and coenzyme Q10. These are great at keeping the skin cells functioning normally and ridding them of harmful particles that can accumulate from everyday life in the skin cells. They are wonderful for health in general.
The richest foods for all of these antioxidants are vegetables, nuts, seeds, pulses, beans and legumes. Consuming lots of them will certainly give you a free of charge boost. To really make sure there is the maximum nutrition in the food then opt for organic options, the soil is more nutrient rich therefore the plants are more nutrient rich.
Those are my best beauty boosting basics, which can be done for free, without investment and everyone can have access to. However, there are certainly some other tips to really give your beauty a boost during lock down.
The first, is to invest in some good skin care. I am not going to plug a particular range or brand, but I want to share with you what to look for in a skin care product. The key trick here is to forget the word moisturiser, and think about nutrients. The skin moisturises itself, so moisturising it daily can trick the skin into being lazy and once the moisturiser is absorbed, the skin can look dull and dry.
Instead of thinking of applying moisture, let’s get our moisture from my first tip in this blog - good hydration. So, if not moisture, what should we be rubbing onto our skin. And this links to my earlier nutrient tip. We can get serums and creams that are not moisturising, but are based around introducing good nutrition directly to the skin. Those essential antioxidants and vitamins, A, C, E and COQ10 etc. can also be given topically, meaning absorbed by applying to the skin. So, maybe jump on an online consultation with a trusted aesthetic clinic or dermatology clinic to discuss how to maximise these nutrients in a skin care regime.
Finally, if we really want to get the best results and outcomes in terms of beauty, we can look to our genes. New scientific techniques have made genetic testing cheaper and more accessible and the genes that influence ageing and skin health can be unlocked easily via a swab test. You don’t even need to part with your blood. If you really want to fine tune a beauty regime, then understanding exactly how your skin works, how it deals with environmental exposures and what its exact micronutrient requirements are will help to fine tune regimes, treatments and plans. Oh, and because this is just a swab test, they can be done at home, so quarantines are not going to get in the way here. Isolation is a perfect time to get to know your skin better. Always go for a trusted genetic provider, offering the highest accuracy test and preferably look for a doctor led genetic test to get the most out of the information revealed.
Well, there you have my six great tips on how to maintain isolation beauty. We have to look good for all of those family pub quizzes after all. Feeling good is important for mental health. A bit of self-maintenance, love and attention goes a long way to improve mood, confidence and to break up these long isolated days.