As we age and spend more time in the sun (especially after these glorious summer days), pigmentation naturally creeps up on us. Having recently turned 40, it’s something that I have noticed comes easier to me if I’m not careful and has made me more conscious to reduce and prevent it.
In my experience, there are 3 key steps to tackling pigmentation naturally. Here’s how:
Cleansing helps in 2 ways. Firstly, it helps to gently exfoliate the skin, removing the top layer of skin cells, which in turn encourages the skin to produce new skin cells. Secondly, and this is specific to our Refining Cleanser, it helps to reduce melanin production (the dark pigments in skin that cause pigmentation). This is because our Refining Cleanser contains Bearberry, a botanical that has been shown to inhibit the enzymes needed to produce melanin.
How often should I cleanse?
Cleansing should take place daily. When using the Refining Cleanser, this is best used in combination with a face cloth such as our Organic Bamboo Face Cloth as this further assists the exfoliation process.
What about the 2 in 1 Face Exfoliant + Mask?
This product is fabulous for serious exfoliation and should be used 2-3 times weekly, with particular attention paid to areas of pigmentation.
After cleansing and exfoliating, the next products that hit your skin need to help further reduce melanin production and promote skin cell turnover.
Firstly, spritz with our Ultimate Biome Spritz. This product is packed with vitamin C which has been shown to inhibit melanin production. It also contains ingredients which encourage a healthy microbiome, overall skin health and protect against environmental pollutants.
After spritzing, we recommend applying a few drops of our Repair Face Serum. This beautiful product contains ingredients which have been shown to reduce pigmentation and increase skin cell turnover.
How often should I use these products?
Both the Ultimate Biome Spritz and Repair Face Serum should be applied every morning and evening.
After going to all these efforts to reduce your pigmentation, the next step is to protect your skin and prevent any further damage. In order to do this, you need to apply a product containing SPF as the sun is the most common cause of skin darkening.
I use our Protect + Clarify Daily Face Lotion as it’s a beautiful light weight lotion which protects my skin from the sun, as well as containing ingredients which fight pigmentation.
Our Protect + Clarify Daily Face Lotion contains SPF15 which blocks 93% of UVB rays. This is enough if you are only spending periodic periods in the sun (I spend most of my days in the office and am only out in the sun for maximum 30 minutes per day). When spending longer periods, it’s best to choose an SPF30 or higher.
How often should I apply this product?
Protect + Clarify Daily Face Lotion should be applied every morning.
So just to re-cap, the 5 products I use to tackle pigmentation are:
Using these products should help to reduce any areas of pigmentation and prevent it from reoccurring again.
Got further queries? Please feel free to email me bridget@clemenceorganics.com
Sunscreen is something that we all know we're supposed to wear on a daily basis and it gets especially drummed into us from a beauty perspective as the best way to maintain the youthfulness of our skin. The thing that bothers me is that there is a lot of misinformation about the level of SPF required and the benefit to skin. I'm here to bust those myths!
Keeping our skin healthy shouldn’t be a difficult or complicated task. However, there are some really simple mistakes that we all make from time to time that can be detrimental to the health of our skin both short and long term. Here are the top 5 mistakes I commonly see:
1. Over cleansing
This is perhaps the most common skincare misstep. We all seem to think that squeaky clean skin is healthy skin but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Every time we cleanse our skin, we’re not only stripping it of dirt, food and make up, we also remove naturally produced oils in the skin, as well as some of the microbiome (the good bacteria, microorganisms etc) that helps maintain our skin’s barrier.
The skin on our bodies is often neglected as we tend to focus on our face and figure our bodies will just look after themselves. Big mistake!
Because our skin is our largest organ and most of what we put on it gets absorbed, choosing high-quality products for the body is so very important. They need to be 100% natural and as organic as possible, to avoid causing skin reactions, disrupting our hormones, and not adding to the toxin burden on our liver.
There are also some simple things you can do to look after your body that will reduce dryness, stop eczema from flaring up and keep it glowing.
