5 Bad Skin Care Habits That Are Ruining Your Skin

   3. Rinsing With Hot Water

Again, going back to my teen years, I believed that using super hot water on my skin would open my pores and make my skin cleaner and clearer. While dermatologists recommend using lukewarm water on skin, I obviously knew better and ignored this advice all the time (what do doctors know, anyways?).

The problem? Hot water strips skin of moisture and can also cause redness and irritation. The temperature of the water you use doesn’t affect how clean your skin will be (hello, that’s what cleansers are for!) and pores don’t open and close. I finally came to terms with this habit and realized that hot water is best saved for laundry instead.

 4. Foaming Cleansers/Irritating Ingredients

Foaming cleansers that leave your skin feeling tight and dry are the devil! Again, I loved these cleansers for their “deep cleaning” ability (at least, that’s what I thought). In reality, all they did was leave my skin overly dry, red and irritated. In addition, many of my skin care staples included irritating ingredients like menthol (Avon’s ClearSkin Pore Penetrating Scrub) or alcohol (Clean & Clear Salicylic Acid Astringent).

Again, realizing that my skin was crying for help, I better educated myself on the negatives of sulfate-based foaming cleansers and other irritants. I promptly swapped these skin killers for a more gentle, hydrating option (like CeraVe Hydrating Cleanser).

    5. Pimple Popping

This is a bit of a cheat here, because while I don’t really get pimples anymore to pop, I do occasionally squeeze some small bumps or blackheads that I come across.

I’ve learned the hard way that squeezing a spot to death just makes matters worse (e.g. bigger, redder, nastier). I still have a slight discolouration between my eyebrows from 20 years ago from over-squeezing a huge cystic blemish because I thought I knew best.

That being said, if I squeeze a spot, I make sure to do so with properly cleansed skin and hands. I also make sure to apply only gentle pressure to the spot I’m squeezing to avoid tearing skin and causing infection. I’ll also use my exfoliating toner to “buff” any areas that appear swollen to speed up the healing process and unclog pores.

For acne sufferers, a good blemish/spot treatment and daily acid exfoliation is your best bet. Keep those popping fingers away.