5 Essential Tips to Detox Your Skincare Routine

By: Natasha Eziquiel-Shriro

Transformation happens all around us when the seasons change, including to our skin. Spring cleaning doesn’t have to be limited to your apartment or your closet — clearing out your pores with a balanced spring skincare routine could be the detox that you need right now.

Here are 5 must-try’s for your #Toxicfree2019 skincare routine.

1. Balance your Diet

If you have dry skin, rosacea, eczema, or breakouts, it is essential to detox your diet.

A detox for clear, healthy skin should include avoiding refined sugars and starches from processed foods (think sugary drinks, store-made cakes and cookies, chips, white bread, white pasta), dairy (milk, cheese, yogurt), and alcohol.

Don’t panic. A detox diet is a temporary plan for a quick reset, and not meant for the rest of your life. Give yourself a few weeks to get in balance.

Fill up on more plant foods, like vegetables, whole grains, beans, nuts, seeds, enjoy fermented foods that provide probiotics, and stick to natural sugars like raw honey and whole fruits. By eating healthier, we flood our body with a sea of nutrients to help heal from the inside out, calm inflammation, and clear out toxins.

2. Let Go of Harsh Cleansers

Wean yourself off products that aim to make your skin “appear” healthy. If the products you use contain benzoyl peroxide, salicylic acid, or steroids, those are suppressive products.

Pick an all-natural face wash for your nighttime skincare routine. The best face wash should not be harsh nor full of chemicals. For beautiful, healthy skin, we need to let go of our desire to control and suppress our face. Jacq’s Organics Healing Face Cleanser is an example of an ideal toxic-free alternative. Rather than using aggressive ingredients that break down the skin’s natural defenses, this gentle cleanser nourishes and protects as it removes impurities.

You may want to start your skincare routine transition with eliminating only one product at a time, so your face can adjust to its new-found freedom. Move toward supportive products that contain natural ingredients that protect the delicate moisture balance of your face and to find lasting clear skin.

Supportive products like jojoba oil closely matches our natural skin oil (sebum) that an elixir with jojoba can help control oil production, provide balanced moisture, and banish breakouts. A jojoba-based cleanser works for daily use to rejuvenate and tone even the most sensitive skin. Marla Rene’s Raw Honey Cleanser takes this to the next level by combining jojoba with calming calendula extract and humectant raw honey.

Natural cleanser ingredients include:

• Honey. In addition to drawing in moisture, honey contains a mild alpha-hydroxy acid, which helps to even out skin tone and brighten complexion.
• Fruit extracts. For gentle exfoliation, the enzymes present in fruits are less harsh than typical gritty exfoliants, yet still work well for daily use to clear away old skin cells. Bonus, antioxidants found in fruit extracts promote growth of healthy new cells!
• Botanicals. Many plants are beneficial for calming skin inflammation and breakouts, shrinking pores, or gently tightening skin. Think ginger, chamomile, hibiscus, calendula, rosemary, and geranium.

3. Go Beyond Skin-Deep Hydration

You’ve survived the winter, meaning your lotion budget tripled and if you’re lucky, you had a winter getaway for some much needed vitamin D. But there’s a good chance you’re like most people, and didn’t drink enough water.

Without the sun and sweat to remind us, many people get dehydrated during the colder months. Caffeine, alcohol, and sugary drinks can sap us of precious water. And for the skin, less water means more toxin build up in the body, which can show up like mysterious bumps, flares, and redness.

Now that spring is here, let your excuses breeze right on out the window.

Plan to drink more water each day, and for deeper hydration, aim for more
unsweetened loose-leaf teas as well. Nourish'd Herbal Organic Tea: Promotes a Healthy Immune System by Golden Flourish works to give your body a nourishing boost through the unpredictable changes of the seasons with our soothing, handcrafted immunity blend. This Herbal Organic Tea contains nutrient-rich properties of each individual herb and combines it with love to maintain your body’s immune system and keep you feeling energetic and ready to take on your day!

4. Be Mindful with Moisture

Follow your nighttime wash routine with a perfectly toxic-free moisturizer. It may help to think about your skin when it's at its best and how you want your skin to look and feel tomorrow, and pick a moisturizer based on that, rather than focus on what it may look like today. Moisture goals can easily be met with all-natural products.

Toxic-free products are more gentle and effective on our skin, many are multi-use, making it easy to slim down your skin care kit to the essentials. Naturalannie Essential’s Soothing Aloe Vera Face Gel is a moisturizer, face mask, eye gel, and aftershave that relies on vitamin-rich aloe plus clarifying essential oils, keeping us safe from the Toxic Twenty.

Here are some ingredients to look for when choosing a moisturizer:

• Argan. Argan oil is also a great match for natural face care. High in vitamin E, it is excellent for plump hydration, healing scars, and evening both dark circles and discolored skin tone.
• Rosehip oil. Rosehip seed oil is rich in fatty acids and vitamin A, which makes it like mother nature’s retinol. A facial cream with rosehip oil is excellent for mature skin, healing, minimizing scars, and improving texture.
• pH balanced add-ins: Apple cider vinegar, rose water, aloe vera. The natural pH level of the skin is acidic, and enjoys a pH range of 4-6.5. We pretty much ignore that when we wash our face with soap, which is pH 8-11, and tap water pH, which lands around pH 7.5. A good product for moisture, whether it’s a lotion, serum, toner, or salve, should help bring the face back to a happy slightly acidic pH. Think apple cider vinegar, rose water and aloe, all of which come in at around pH 4.5-5.5.

5. Lay with Less Chemicals

It may sound like a home cleaning tip, but the truth is, typical laundry detergents are full of chemicals that can trigger allergies, dry skin, eczema, and other skin irritations. Switching to a non-toxic laundry detergent this spring can help to reduce skin problems for the year to come.

Learn more about the benefits of toxic free laundry detergents from our recent blog post.

Feeling inspired to try a spring skincare detox? What changes are you willing to make to your daily skincare routine?

Comment below to let us know what toxic skin care habits you are planning to give up in 2019!