Help Me Choose Natural Skin Care for Exfoliation

How often you need to exfoliate depends on your skin type, but one or two times a week seems to be the standard for most. Remember the purpose of exfoliating is to remove excess dead skin cells. You do not want to scrub so hard that you are removing healthy cells, which will leave your skin red and sore.

Oily skin: exfoliate once or twice a week
Dry skin: exfoliate once a week
Mature skin: exfoliate once a week

You may be wondering, "How Do I Know If I Need To Exfoliate?" Here is a simple test you can do yourself to see if you have dead dry skin cells on the surface of your skin. 

• Take a piece of clear tape and apply it to your forehead
• Rub it gently and remove
• Look at the tape, and if there are little pieces of flaky skin, then you need to exfoliate!

Although many experts advise that the best time to exfoliate your skin is when you wake up in the morning, there is no one true solution that fits everybody.

Since your skin repairs and renews itself overnight, you wake up with new dead skin cells on the skin's surface. Exfoliating in the morning helps slough away dead skin.

For more comprehensive info on Exfoliation, read our blog, "The Nitty Gritty of Exfoliation"

Rub your exfoliating product firmly but gently on wet skin in a circular motion. Sensitive facial skin should be scrubbed gently, while the skin on your torso can be scrubbed a bit harder.

The very sensitive area around the eyes does not need and should not be exfoliated. Since skin oils tend to hold on to dead skin cells, people with oily skin may need to exfoliate more often.

It's a good idea to remove any makeup and cleanse your skin before exfoliating in order to get a good deep clean.

Acne and Oily Skin

If you have acne-prone or very oily skin you may think you need to exfoliate often. But, washing your face too much and over-exfoliating will dry out the skin. The sebaceous glands react to this excess dryness by producing even more oil which ultimately causes more breakouts to occur. So, we suggest exfoliating once or twice a week.

Dry Skin

Exfoliation for those with dry skin is very important, especially in winter. When our skin feels dry we too often slather on heavy creams to compensate for the dryness. But dry skin flaky skin means that you have a build-up of dead, dry skin cells. Why would you want to moisturize dry, dead skin cells?  What you really want to do is exfoliate those dead skin cells away and then moisturize the skin. 

A great product for dry facial skin in need of exfoliation is our gentle Adzuki Bean Scrub. 

You may not realize it, but simple exfoliation occurs every time you wash your face, from the friction of rubbing your skin with a washcloth or even your hands. 

We have natural soaps that we call "exfoliating" soaps, but we also have many soaps that contain ingredients that provide gentle exfoliation. Rubbing a simple soap bar that contains crushed or powdered botanicals or even clays can help remove dead skin cells. 

• Some of our natural soaps contain botanicals (Citrus Woods, Scarborough Fair, Sweet Basil) that add a bit of exfoliation every time you wash.
• Some natural soaps contain oatmeal (Avocado Oats & Shea, Oatmeal Spice, Goat Milk Oatmeal) or clays (Rhassoul, Dead Sea) that also aids in sloughing off dead skin cells.
• Natural soaps that contain sugar and/or milk products (Goat Milk Oatmeal, Carrot & Honey) are high in natural acids that help loosen the glue-like substances that hold the surface skin cells to each other allowing dead skin cells to slough off more easily