Makeup is an incredible invention by humankind — it allows us the liberty of covering up our flaws or accentuating our assets on demand, giving us full power and control of how we choose to look. If used in excess or incorrectly, it can also very easily be a source of stress or insecurity for users, which makes it a very fine line to walk if you choose to apply makeup regularly. During the summer or in heat especially, it can become very detrimental to your skin’s health to be using certain things like foundation, as the added duress on your glands will only cause more breakouts and clogged pores. Thus, it’s important to know what alternatives exist to applying makeup every day that can promote proper skin health while still creating some of the desired effects that makeup does. Here are some of such things to consider.
Protecting and Strengthening Your Skin
One of the best ways you can ensure that your skin will always look its best is by taking proper care of it in the first place. More often than not, the effects we desire when applying foundation or concealer can be achieved with some good old-fashioned maintenance. Keeping your skin fresh by washing and exfoliating it regularly can make a world of difference, for example. By regularly using a facial scrub, either homemade or otherwise, you can easily remove dead cells on your face and make strides toward getting rid of dullness, dark spots, clogged pores, and acne. All it takes is one good scrubbing a week (or perhaps 2-3, depending on how sensitive or oily your skin is) to bring out more of the evenness in your facial skin and brighten up your tone, something we usually rely on makeup to do.
Likewise, staying hydrated can do wonders for the appearance of your skin. If your skin is generally fairly dry, drinking a lot of water won’t directly fix the problem. It will, however, be a good first step toward a solution, as your skin does use more of your body’s water to hydrate itself when there’s enough water to go around. If you’ve already got that down, hydrating the skin itself is essential to a healthy look. If you have dry skin, any moisturizer or hydrating gel will do. If you have more oily skin, you should look for a lightweight organic gel or lotion formula that doesn’t contain oil to avoid further clogging your pores and causing acne. Finding something completely organic and natural will always work best, as those natural elements and extracts can work in conjunction with our skin’s normal processes. The right formula can leave your skin more plump and healthy-looking, with a glowing and reflective accent to it. Using sunscreen and other lotions with SPF-15 or higher can also help prevent the sun’s negative effects on the skin, like drying it out, building wrinkles, and creating age spots.
Self-Maintenance
While proper care can certainly promote healthier-looking skin in the long-term, there are a few things you can do in the short-term to help bring out some of the qualities in your face that we usually use makeup to enhance. For example, forgoing eyeliner, eyeshadow, and mascara can leave your eyes needing a bit more help to stand out. To counteract this, you can use your eyebrows to contour that part of your face and frame it in a more attractive way. Some simple touch-ups on shaping can go a long way — take the time to groom your eyebrows so that your brow begins at the inner corner of your eye and your arch hangs distinctly above the outside edge of your iris. Something as simple as this can create a definitive and unique impression of your eyes and face, even rendering makeup somewhat unnecessary to that end.
Similarly, some simple grooming in your lips can do wonders in bringing out their natural color. That color will always suit you best, as it’s what is most easily associated with your body, skin tone, and face, so it can become somewhat unnecessary to layer on the gloss and colors. Simply exfoliating your lips once a week and hydrating them will give them a plump and healthy look — it can be as easy as taking a toothbrush and gently rubbing your lips with lip balm to get rid of all of the dead skin cells lingering. It will bring out that natural color again.
Maintaining a healthy sleep schedule (yes, beauty sleep is real!) and proper nutrition are also paramount to healthy-looking skin, as your body can’t operate to repair and replace as quickly if it’s not able to run at peak performance. This can mean eating healthy, getting some exercise, getting enough sleep, and ridding your body of toxins. What’s happening on the inside is directly correlated to what will appear to be happening on the outside.
It can be incredibly difficult to imagine not wearing some kind of makeup every day, but the truth is that it can end up causing more harm than good in the long run if you overdo it or don’t take proper care of yourself. Your skin was made to be the first thing that people can see, and your face is the pinnacle of that. It’s important to remember that you don’t necessarily need makeup to look the way you want to, and that the way you treat your body and your skin can make a big difference on how you feel, with or without it.
