All Made Up: Real Life Skin Care

Let’s talk about skin care. Go into any beauty retailer, find a sales person and ask them to recommend a skin care regimen. Then duck, because you are about to get hit with an avalanche of products your skin “needs.” They’re going to try to sell you a makeup remover, a cleanser, a scrub, a toner, a serum, a moisturizer, a spot treatment, an eye cream and a sunscreen. A really ambitious sales person will try to sell you two of each, a different one for day and night.

By Liza

Now in a perfect world an elaborate skin care regimen can be very good for your skin, but let’s get real. When you’re coming back to the dorm at 4am and crashing, your makeup smearing off on the pillow is the closet thing you get to skin care.

It is a good idea to have a solid skin care system, especially if you have an issue like acne or dry patches that need treatment. But with so many steps, it’s all or nothing and you need a back up plan that you’ll actually use and that actually works!

So when time is tight or you are feeling lazy there are three very important steps to hit.

1. Remove makeup

2. Cleanse

3. Moisturize

Here are some products that can kill two (or three) birds with one stone.

Philosophy Purity Made Simple ($10-32 sephora.com)

This great little product dissolves makeup, dirt and oil, so it removes makeup and cleanses your face at the same time! Its also pH balanced so you don’t need a toner. Just throw a little moisturizer on after washing with this stuff and you’re good to go.

Olay Daily Facials ($7.50 in drugstores)

These little miracle cloths do just about everything. Simply wet the cloth, work up a lather, and scrub all the makeup off your face (even waterproof mascara!). It cleanses your skin while exfoliating, toning and hydrating. It’s so effective you might be able to throw out all of your other products all together. Your skin will feel amazing!

Caudalie Instant Foaming Cleanser ($10-26 sephora.com)

This fabulous gentle foaming face cleanser is made from all natural ingredients. Its soap, sulfate, paraben and dye free. It foams up to dissolve makeup and absorb dirt and oils and it’s pH balanced to leave skin feeling moisturized. The best part – you don’t even need water! You can keep this little pump by your nightstand to keep your skin looking great even when you are too lazy (or wasted) to go to the bathroom!