Beauty is indeed only skin deep, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pamper it. After all, healthy, beautiful skin is the best tool you have in your makeup bag for looking good. Lucky you, the beauty industry spends a lot of time and money developing products to address skin’s problems and enhance its assets. Following are some of the newest products and procedures developed to help you achieve and maintain healthy, radiant skin.
Really Personalized Skincare
If you’ve ever had a beauty counter consultation or filled out a form to figure out what skincare products are right for you, you know that sometimes the answers to the questions aren’t as simple as picking A, B, C or D. Maybe you have dry skin and are concerned about signs of aging, but you also tend to get breakouts. The typical diagnostic tools tend to take you down one path or another without addressing all of your concerns. DNA-guided personalized skin care solutions promise to put a stop to hit or miss product searches.
A simple cheek swab gives scientists what they need to examine your skin’s DNA and prescribe the best skincare ingredients for you. Home test kits, such as the HomeDNA Skin Care Testing Kit from DNA Diagnostics Center, return a detailed report that covers topics such as skin sensitivity, sun protection, collagen quality and fine lines and wrinkles. For better or worse, the report does not list specific brands or products or give you tips about how or when to apply them. Instead, it tells you what ingredients in products will be most effective for your skin. It will help guide you in your purchases, but you will still have to do some legwork to find products to meet your needs.
Products with Natural Ingredients
Cosmetics colored with fruit and vegetable extracts instead of chemical dyes and skincare with natural oils from fish and plants are the result of a trend in natural beauty products and cosmetics combined with consumers’ desire to know and feel good about what’s in the products they use. Some of the latest ingredients from nature to look for in skincare products include oils derived from salmon, a fatty acid called willow bark that is used to treat skin inflammation and plant-based products containing algae, kale and spinach.
Next Level Body Contouring
This one’s not exactly about skincare, but you’ll want to show off more skin when you look and feel better about your more toned midsection. You may have heard about non-invasive fat-reduction procedures like CoolSculpting that freezes and removes fat cells and SculpSure that uses heat to melt fat cells, but the newest option, called Emsculpt, takes body shaping a step further. Emsculpt uses high-intensity focused electromagnetic energy to cause powerful muscle contractions that break down fat cells while building muscle. The Food and Drug Administration cleared Emsculpt for the improvement of abdominal tone, strengthening of the abdominal muscles and the development of a firmer abdomen. Emsculpt also is approved for strengthening, toning and firming the buttocks. Emsculpt should be used along with—not in place of—a healthy diet and exercise. With no downtime and the only discomfort being equated with the muscle soreness of a vigorous workout but with better results, Emsculpt can help you trim fat, tone muscle and make you love the skin you’re in.
Cryotherapy for More Than Injury Recovery
Cryotherapy isn’t just for athletes anymore. It can help with weight loss, psoriasis, stimulate collagen production, reduce inflammation and more. Cryotherapy uses very cold temperatures to stimulate the blood vessels, causing them to constrict. The extreme cold also stimulates your body to burn calories and produce collagen. If you want all-over skin benefits or some of the other body benefits of cryotherapy, then you need to go in a cryotherapy chamber, which uses a fine nitrogen mist to cool your body to sub-zero temperatures for a very short time.
You can also use cryotherapy to treat just your facial skin. No need to go in a chamber, the technician will spray your face with subzero air. It removes the outer layer of dead skin cells, promotes even and smooth distribution of new cell growth, reduces pore size, decreases wrinkles and lines, lightens dark spots and improves blood flow and collagen production, which all adds up to fresher, younger-looking skin.
Masks
Masks are not new, but they are having a moment right now. Stop into any beauty supply store or walk down a facial care aisle in a drugstore and you’ll see masks of all kinds. Masks aren’t just for your face, either. You can find them to treat your hands, feet, hair, décolleté and under your eyes. The number and variety of different masks can be overwhelming, but since you usually can purchase them in inexpensive single-use packets and they should only be used two or three times a week, you can try out different masks without making a big commitment.
Masks come in different formulations to address different skin concerns. In general, you put the mask on and relax for about 10 minutes while it goes to work. Then, depending on the type of mask, you rinse, tissue or peel it off.
- Clay masks detoxify skin by drawing out impurities from your pores.
- Cream masks contain moisturizers and oils that hydrate and replenish skin.
- Gel masks soothe and cool sensitive or irritated skin.
- Exfoliating masks remove dead skin cells and often include ingredients to brighten and give skin a nice glow.
- Sheet masks may be infused with products to tone, clarify, moisturize or brighten skin. You lay the sheet over your face, pat it down, wait for it to work its magic, remove it and gently work any remaining product into your skin.
Analiese Kreutzer is a contributing writer to VivaTysons and VivaReston. As a long-time resident of the area, she is passionate about the communities, people and businesses our publications cover. She can be reached at AnalieseKreutzer@gmail.com.
