How to Start a New Skincare Routine WITHOUT Breaking Out!

My Sensitive Skincare Show Podcast #5

How to start a new skincare routine without creating rashes, breakouts and allergic reactions for your sensitive skin.  Listen to our step by step process on how to transition to new skincare products.

Resources Mentioned

More information on how to choose safer skin care products can be found at our Safe Cosmetics Guide.

Prefer to Read?  Here's the Transcript

Hello again welcome everyone to the My Sensitive Skin Care Show. 

I’m so happy that you’ve joined me today! I’d like to share some quick tips for you on how to start a new skincare routine.

Now, you know, it’s the beginning of the year and it’s often a time when we want to try some new things, but sensitive skin can be very, very well…very, very sensitive! So if you have this experience, I know I have many times ... I decide I want to try a new product line, (or I used to do skincare product reviews for my website) but my skin would break out every time I’d try something new! So I have some tips that will help you when you decide that you’d like to change up your skincare routine a little bit.

I want to say another thing about that too because our bodies, you know, just like you would not eat the same food every day, (well some people do!) but most people like a little variety on their diet. Well, it’s the same thing for our skin.

Even if we have a favorite skin care products, every once in a while when we get a desire to try something new sometimes that’s a good and healthy thing, but it’s just a challenge when your skin is very, very sensitive. So here are some tips. I have five tips that I have found very helpful and you know you can see, you can let me know in the comments or by going to my website and leaving a voice message, you can let me know if these are helpful for you.

So first of all, when you’d like to start some new skincare products, I would recommend choosing products that are less likely to cause skin irritation. Now, I have done quite a bit of writing about this at my website and I’ll have a link for you later on so that you can look at some of the skin care product lines that I have found helpful. But mainly you want to choose products that are less likely to cause irritation.

Now, there are two different types of skincare products that I’m aware of. There’s most skincare products are what you would call bioactive. They have ingredients in them that are designed to do things for your skin like brighten your skin or take away wrinkles or lighten your skin. And so there are various botanicals or chemicals that will do things for your skin. So that’s called bioactive skin care.

Then there’s what you would call hypoallergenic skincare which is for people like us whose skin is very sensitive and tends to react when you put anything on it. So, hypoallergenic skincare products are designed to minimize irritation and they usually don’t have those kinds of intense ingredients that the bioactive skincare would have.

Of course the challenge with hypoallergenic products is you might not feel like you’re looking your best because they don’t have those nice anti-wrinkle or anti-aging, anti-acne, whatever it is they don’t have that. They’re designed to do simple moisturizing, cleansing and things like that.

There is one hypoallergenic skincare product line that I have found actually produces some very nice skincare results and you can also find that on my website, my main number one recommended hypoallergenic skincare product line. Most of them I find actually are not very helpful for my skin.

There is one that doesn’t have toxic ingredients, doesn’t have toxic chemicals fragrances and that actually will make your skin look better. They’ve managed to find a way to help your skin to look great without putting in a lot of irritating ingredients. So that’s the number one tip is choose products that are less likely to cause irritation.

The second tip is when you start a new skincare routine, let’s say you’ve got a set of three products …you know, a cleanser, a toner and a cream, for example. What you want to do is do a skin test first with each new product to see if your skin can tolerate the products.

Doing a skin test is actually pretty simple. You just take a dab of the cream and you put it on the inside of your elbow or behind your ear or someplace that isn’t on your face basically, and you just wait. You leave it there for six hours or 12 hours and see if you get a rash.

Obviously if you get a rash, then it isn’t going to be a good choice for you. And what you should do though is test every single product that you’re planning on using. So it might take you a few days, so you can’t just run in and put on a bunch of different new products all at once, that’s a recipe for skin rash! Okay, so the next thing is to do a skin test with each new product.

Just as an aside related to this, let’s say you use a cleanser, a toner and a skin cream. If you’re starting with a new product line and you’ve skin tested the new line and it looks like it’s going to work okay for you, I would recommend not jumping in all at once, but let’s say just starting with the new cleanser first and just doing that for four days.

Then if all goes well…so you start with the new cleanser and you use your old toner and moisturizer, so you’re kind of doing a very gentle transition. Like four days with the new cleanser, then if all that works, try four days with the new toner. Just do like that and then add in the new moisturizer and then you’ll be all transitioned over to the new skincare product line without getting a breakout.

The other thing that I would recommend in terms of switching out your skincare products is not to do it that often. I usually kind of feel intuitively when I need to try a new skincare line, but it isn’t something that I would recommend that you do a lot. Like maybe every a couple of months, but you know not to do it too often or again you could get skin rashes.

So I hope these tips are helpful for you on how to start a new skincare routine without breaking out. And I’ll include a link. If you go into my website, www.mysensitiveskincare.com and at the top of the page you’ll see a link to recommended products and you’ll see there my number one recommended hypoallergenic skincare line  which I think maybe helpful for you. It certainly has worked really well for me.

So that’s all for today, thank you so much for joining me at the My Sensitive Skincare Show and blessings and good wishes and Happy New Year!