Habits to Turbocharge Your Nighttime Skincare Routine

Getting your fair share of beauty sleep is crucial to healthy skin. The nightly rest allows your skin to relax and regenerate, leaving you fresh the next morning. But if you don’t have a good bedtime skin routine, you might be setting your skin up for failure. The benefits of sleep can be undone by poor skincare habits. Conversely, it can be turbocharged by the right ones. 

So if you want to make the most of your beauty sleep, here are four tips to follow before you hit the sheets!

1. Cleanse your face

Throughout the day, your face produces oil, sheds dead skin cells, and accumulates clumps of make-up applied during the day. Allowing your skin to marinade for hours in that blend is a surefire way to get clogged pores and irritation. 

Cleaning your face may be the most basic step in one’s nightly skincare routine, but that doesn’t mean it’s the easiest to keep up. When you get home after a long day, cleaning your face might seem like a chore worth putting off until tomorrow. But resisting that thought is crucial to having good skin. A few minutes in the bathroom every night has a significant pay-off in the long term health of your skin. But if you just can’t do it, make sure to leave a pack of make-up remover wipes by your bedside table. It may not remove all the grime off, but a little is better than none at all.

2. Use the right products

While most skincare products can be used day and night, there are others that are more effective when used after sundown. For example, dermatologists will always instruct you to use retinoids at night as their efficacy decreases when exposed to sunlight.

For those with dry skin, ointments and other products with thick, rich formulations may also be more comfortable to use at night, just because you can put as much as needed without feeling discomfort throughout the day and worrying about your make-up.

Take a good look at your skincare routine to see if there are products that are best relegated to the night shift. 

3. Keep it simple and consistent

A nightly skincare routine is the perfect chance to pamper yourself after a long hard day at work. But overindulging yourself by using too many products may be counterproductive. It is important to make sure that the active ingredient of one product does not interfere with the active ingredient of the other. Or worse still, some ingredients combined together could potentially aggravate your skin or cause irritation.

A multi-step skincare routine may also be difficult to keep up, especially for those days when you’re too tired to do it all. Consider paring it down to a regimen composed of products that specifically target the skin problems you face. A simple routine is much easier to do consistently, and we all know that skincare is about the long term game.

4. Improve sleep quality

Once your skin is all prepped for bed, it’s time to actually get some shuteye. Think of it as the last step in your skincare routine. To improve the length and quality of your sleep, it’s important to remove all distractions. At least 20 minutes before bed, put your phone down and turn your laptop off. Do calming activities like drinking caffeine-free tea, breathing exercises, or a playlist of natural sounds that help you drift off to wonderland.

Conclusion

Take advantage of your downtime by customising your skincare routine for the night. The (hopefully at least) 8 hours of sleep in a controlled environment allows you to maximize the effect of certain skin care products. Giving your body as much rest as possible will help you achieve that healthy, glowing look both inside and out.

The information presented on this website and in this article is for general information and example purposes only, does not contain health advice specific for users and must not be relied on for that purpose.  Please see your GP, dermatologist or other health care professional for specific advice.