8 Bad Habits That Ruin Your Complexion Without You Knowing
While you may have the best intentions when it comes to your skin, it’s so easy to unknowingly pick up bad habits as you progress through life. Usually, rather than causing a significant amount of immediate damage, the effects of these bad habits slowly accumulate in the skin. This means that once they do decide to make themselves visible, be it in the form of acne, wrinkles, or anything else, determining the root cause of your new complexion concerns can be so much of a challenge.
So, to ensure that you’re not unwittingly causing any damage to your skin, read on as Vivo Per Lei talks through eight complexion-harming bad habits, along with tips on how to break them!
1. Skipping Your Evening Cleanse
You’re probably aware of how you should be cleansing your skin each evening, particularly if you wear makeup. Nevertheless, after a long day or an even longer night, skincare can sometimes feel like the last thing you want to deal with.
However, going to bed with dirty skin is one of the worst things that you could possibly do for your complexion. Not only will your skin be holding onto all of the grime that it’s picked up over the course of the day, but it will also be populated with pollutants, dead skin cells, excess sebum, and other impurities. As your face rubs against your pillow while you sleep, this layer of impurities gets pushed deeper into your skin. They delve into the pores, causing dullness, an uneven skin texture, blockages, and acne.
Plus, let’s not forget that all of those pollutants and other impurities are known to deeply damage skin cells. Studies show that they trigger inflammation in the skin and accelerate the skin aging process. This doesn’t happen overnight, but skip your evening cleanse regularly and it won’t be long before this takes a toll on your complexion.
To make sure that you never again neglect cleansing your skin in the evenings, find a cleanser that you absolutely love. The Vivo Per Lei Hyaluronic Acid Daily Facial Wash would be a great choice. It’ll leave your skin feeling so incredibly refreshed that you’ll soon start to look forward to cleansing your skin, with your evening skincare routine becoming one of the highlights of your day!
2. Using Skincare Products That Aren’t Suitable for Your Complexion
When shopping for skincare, it’s easy to be persuaded by clever marketing or hyped-up ingredients. As a result, it’s common for people to end up buying products that aren’t really suitable for their skin. In the long run, this can cause some serious problems…
What makes a product unsuitable?
A number of different factors. For starters, it could be unsuitable for your skin type. For example, if you have oily skin and are using a gentle cream cleanser, you’ll likely soon experience skin that feels even greasier. Instead, a foaming cleanser, like the Vivo Per Lei Collagen Foaming Cleanser, would be the better choice for your skin type.
Skincare products can also be unsuitable because of certain ingredients that they contain. Parabens, for example, are a preservative that irritates the skin, with some experts linking it to skin cancer. However, they’re still allowed to be used in skincare products, even though doing so could potentially harm your complexion in the long term.
To fix this bad habit, take a close look at each and every product in your skincare routine. Make sure that all of the ingredients within them are suitable for both your skin type and your skin concerns. While you’re at it, take a look at the safety ratings for those ingredients too. This may seem like a lot of work, but your skin will thank you in the future!
3. Neglecting Your Eye Area
Did you know that the skin around your eyes is significantly thinner than the skin anywhere else on your face and body? As you can imagine, this poses a few problems…
To start with, it means that the eye area tends to be drier and more dehydrated. Moisture evaporates at a faster rate from thin skin. Being so fragile, it’s also highly prone to wear and tear, along with aging. The majority of people start to notice expression lines forming around their eyes before creases appear anywhere else on the face.
These unique needs are exactly why the eye area should be treated a little differently from the rest of the face. There’s nothing wrong with using your regular facial skincare products around your eyes, but it would also be worth investing in one or two dedicated products that give this delicate skin the extra attention that it needs.
Take the Vivo Per Lei Age Control Eye Cream, for example. This standout formula addresses the unique needs of the eye area with a specialized blend of ingredients. Jojoba seed oil, sodium hyaluronate, and hemp seed oil hydrate and moisturize the skin without clogging pores while the numerous vitamins and antioxidant-rich extracts in this formula work to firm up the look of loose skin and tighten the appearance of wrinkles.
4. Forgetting to Adjust Your Skincare Routine as the Seasons Change
The skin goes through a few big changes as the seasons transition. During the summer months, the warmer temperatures and increased humidity stimulate the sebaceous glands to produce more sebum. This means that those with dry skin feel better moisturized, whereas those with oily skin are more prone to breakouts.
However, in the winter, the opposite occurs. Sebum production slows down, meaning flakiness and itching for dry skin types, along with a brief relief in acne severity for those with oily skin.
If you want to avoid the seasonal problems that your complexion seems to face each year, try adjusting your skincare routine the next time the seasons shift. Go ahead and use richer creams in the winter months but lighten up your skincare routine as the temperature rises.
A product like the Vivo Per Lei Marine Sensitive Facial Hydro-Gel is perfect for summertime usage for all skin types. It’s an extremely lightweight moisturizer that still manages to hold a number of powerful hydrating ingredients. It’s packed with antioxidants too, making it great for keeping your complexion protected from environmental damage.
5. Touching a Dirty Phone to Your Face
According to research, the average phone is home to ten times more bacteria than a toilet seat. This may seem shocking at first, but consider the many different surfaces that your phone comes into contact with each day. With every surface that it touches, it picks up a whole host of bacteria. Not to mention, each different environment that it encounters puts it into contact with new air pollutants.
Of course, this means that each time you touch your phone to your face, a large chunk of those germs move on over, taking residence on your skin instead. It doesn’t take long before this triggers an acne breakout.
What can you do about this?
In addition to keeping your face clean by cleansing twice a day, it’s also important to keep your phone clean. There are a number of ways in which you can do this, with the easiest being to use antibacterial wipes. However, make sure that you first check to see if your phone is compatible with the ingredients in the wipes you intend to use! Some models don’t tolerate the use of alcohol-based ingredients, and ignoring this could end up damaging your phone.
6. Sleeping on a Dirty Pillowcase
We’ve already talked about how easy it is for your cellphone to harbor germs, but did you know that the same applies to your pillowcase too? Research shows that a pillowcase that hasn’t been washed for a week could contain thousands the number of germs as a toilet seat.
This is all down to the sweat, sebum, dead skin cells, and saliva that it absorbs every night. They provide the perfect environment for bacteria to thrive.
As you can imagine, this isn’t good news for your skin. In order to prevent the blemishes and breakouts that dirty pillowcases can cause, make an effort to wash your pillowcase every two to three days.
7. Forgetting to Apply or Reapply Sunscreen
Many people think that skin aging is down to genetics. However, they would be wrong. Instead, the majority of the visible signs of aging that you develop, from wrinkles to age spots to sagging skin, are caused by UV rays.
So, if you’re hoping to improve your complexion but are also guilty of forgetting to regularly use sunscreen, it’s time to break this bad habit. Although you can’t literally turn back the clock and remind your younger self to apply SPF, being more diligent about sun protection from now on will still go a long way in preventing your visible skin concerns from worsening.
With that said, a single application in the morning isn’t enough. This is another bad habit that many people are guilty of. By using a sun protection product in their morning skincare routine, they feel that their skin will then be protected throughout the day. Unfortunately, a sunscreen will only protect the skin for a couple of hours, after which the damage starts to occur.
To make sure that your skin remains fully protected, find yourself an SPF 30 sunscreen and make sure that you reapply it every two hours. Set a reminder on your phone if necessary, and make sure that you keep a tube of your sunscreen in various locations, such as your home, office, and car, so that you never need to go without it.
8. Using Hot Water on Your Skin
There’s nothing quite as satisfying as a steaming hot shower, especially on a cold day. However, languishing under all of that heat could be doing your skin more harm than you realize…
Hot water is notorious for stripping away the skin’s natural barrier. This dries out and dehydrates the skin over time, leading to a number of different problems.
While it may not feel quite as indulgent, try making the switch to lukewarm the next time you’re cleansing your face or taking a shower. It won’t be long before your skin starts to look healthier because of your new showering habits!
Achieve a Radiant Complexion With Vivo Per Lei
It’s so easy to develop bad habits, yet breaking them takes significantly longer. If you can relate to any of the habits we’ve discussed above, then it’s time to make some changes. However, take things slowly, working on just one habit at a time. This way, you’ll be so much more likely to successfully turn those bad habits into good ones, enabling you to enjoy a radiant complexion for many years to come.
