- Hello, welcome back to the Adore Beauty YouTube channel.
I'm Alicia.
I feel like by now people should know me,
because I've been on here like a fair bit.
Today we're gonna talk about
something that happened to me personally,
about eight weeks ago,
and it really, it really scarred me.
Like it really, it really cut me deep, hurt my soul.
Like I fully recovered, but I haven't fully recovered.
Do you know what I mean?
So we're gonna be talking about what to do
when you impair your skin barrier.
So eight weeks ago, or around about then,
I thought it would be a really good idea
to do a chemical peel at home,
'cause we were like peak lockdown and I thought
like what else am I gonna do?
So I did a chemical peel
and then I followed it up with exfoliation,
chemical exfoliation, because I thought my skin is fine.
It can, you know, handle it,
then I thought, oh, I'll just chuck on a vitamin C,
and then I just decided to seal it all in
with fragrance moisturiser that I never used before.
As you can imagine, I really put my skin through the ringer.
It decided to humble me pretty quickly.
I woke up to like red, raw stinging, scaly skin
that was leathery and tight
and dry and oily all at the same time.
Like it was every skin type combination
was on my skin the next day,
and it was just so inflamed and red
and redness isn't something that I struggle with personally
so for me, I knew that my barrier had left the chat.
I guess when it happened to me,
I did cry for like an hour, truth be told,
and if there's one thing I've learned from this experience
is that when you have no barrier,
you need to strip everything back.
You need to be super gentle.
You need to be putting skin replenishing ingredients
onto your skin and you just need to give it so much love,
so much care and just have so much patience.
I set myself a challenge
that I would bring it back in a week,
and a week later it was definitely, definitely a lot better.
I wouldn't say it was a hundred percent healed,
but it wasn't stinging, it wasn't burning,
or it wasn't itching,
and the redness and the flaking had gone,
so it was definitely on its way to healing.
We'll just start from the very beginning.
The first thing I did when I woke up
was I looked at my skin, like I said.
I was very upset and I was like, okay,
there is only one thing to do at this current moment
and that is to go and put SPF on, tonnes of SPF on
and sit away from all of the windows.
I literally wore a hat inside.
I wore sunglasses and I was far away from the windows.
I had the blinds down because when you don't have a barrier,
your skin is so much more sensitive.
Think about it, your barrier is the last line of defence,
keeping out toxins, environmental stresses, aggressors,
everything, so without it,
there's nothing protecting your skin
and nothing kind of protecting your face in a sense.
The last thing I need is to worry about UV radiation
and UV rays, and reapply every single hour.
The second thing that I did was
I changed up my cleansing routine.
So typically I'll go in with a double cleanse.
I'll do an oil based cleanser,
and then I'll do a gel cleanser.
However, now is not the time to go in
with a gel based cleanser.
You want really nourishing ingredients.
You want a cream cleanser.
If you don't have a cream cleanser,
you can go in with an oil cleanser and just do it twice
really, really gently, rub that on the skin.
'Cause obviously you want to get rid
of this sunscreen that you've put on.
Typically cream cleansers are formulated with ingredients
that are just really nourishing.
They have tonnes of ceramides, squalene, glycerin,
and it's just gonna add hydration and moisture
back into the skin just kind of sealing it in.
So the next thing I did, and this is a personal choice
but I found that it helped me
is that I put on my at-home LED mask.
So the mask that I have comes with three settings,
red, blue, and yellow.
So I typically use blue to kind of kill bacteria
when I do have hormonal breakouts
and then red is really good for inflammation
and just bringing down redness.
It's, you know, what they use in salons
when you go get a facial.
So I pop that on my skin for 10 minutes.
Hello I am in a different location, different outfit.
Different year, but the same me.
Turns out even though doing content is my job,
I am technologically not great,
and I don't understand how to upload things to Google Drive.
So we're just gonna pretend
like this little glitch didn't happen
and just move right along.
So if you have kind of, you know,
impaired your skin barrier or like burnt your skin off
or experiencing any of those kind of side effects,
what you need to do is stop all of your actives
and just get really gentle ingredients into your routine.
So for me specifically, I used a vitamin B serum
and hyaluronic acid just to really add that hydration in.
And as we know, vitamin B is great in terms
of strengthening the skin barrier and just making sure
that your skin is getting all of that love that it needs.
And if you put more active ingredients, you know
like your retinoids and your exfoliants onto your skin,
it's just gonna freak out even more
and go from being bad to worse.
So now that you've paired back your routine,
let's talk about moisturisers
and why using the right one is really important.
I personally love using a really occlusive
thick moisturiser, something really reparative.
I went straight in to Murad Intense Recovery Cream
and La Roche Posay Cicaplast Baume.
Both have been designed to essentially restore the skin
and both can be used across kind of any part of the body.
It's designed for severely dry, severely stressed,
severely kind of triggered skin from the environment.
Now that we've spoken about the routine,
let's just quickly talk about how long it does take
for it to heal, because you have to be patient.
It will get worse before it gets better.
And that's completely normal.
Day one to day two,
it was really red, tight, dry, congested.
It was just a mixture of everything.
But then at kind of the day, like three to four mark,
I started to notice these white bumps
and the fact that it wasn't as oily
and it wasn't as dry and it wasn't as tight
and it didn't feel as painful and sore.
At kind of the four to like six day mark,
they started to flake off.
This is where you need to show restraint and control,
because peeling like any form of peeling,
any form of like flaking off, it's healing,
but you can't pick at it.
So you just can't pick at your skin.
You just have to kind of keep going with your routine
and just, you know, have faith that everything's working
the way it's supposed to and your body is kind of, you know,
doing what it needs to
to get your skin back to a healthy state.
So be patient, keep going with the routine.
I personally avoided all types of exercise,
because your skin is already in a really vulnerable state.
I didn't want to kind of put more heat into my body.
I promise you it will heal.
Keep going with the serums, with the hydration,
with the LED mask, with the moisturiser, the SPF,
and just staying away from the sun,
giving all of your fancy skincare a rest
and just stripping it back, it will heal.
The skin does regenerate every 28 days.
If you guys have any questions,
or have had a worse skincare barrier story than mine,
please share them below.
I'd love to know.
I'd also love to hear what products
you're using to recover it,
and hopefully I will chat to you guys soon.
I've actually run out of all of the products
that I use to repair my skin barrier,
and I've ordered them all again from Adore Beauty.
Should I, oh my God, imagine you insert like an image
and I'll do like this,
like I point to like the sad face of my skin.