At this time in the year, skin complaints can flare up for many of us. From frigid temperatures outside to balmy central heating inside, as well as loading up on active skincare ingredients, our skin can quickly become irritated.
Repairing your skin barrier is one of the more difficult hurdles for anyone looking to treat acne, rosacea or sensitive skin. Very often, it's overworking your skin in the attempt to fix it that makes it worse, so say the experts.
I joined Dr. David Jack, one of the leading skincare experts, for the launch of his three-step skincare routine, which was designed to return problematic and over-worked skin to its natural equilibrium. Based out of his esteemed Harley Street clinic, where he has treated a slew of celebrity faces, Jack has turned to his medical training in burn surgery to create the range.
"You don't need to do that much for your skin to support its physiology", Jack tells RTÉ Lifestyle. "There's a limited number of ingredients that actually do anything, and the skin kind of gets overwhelmed a bit by doing too much to it."
With this in mind, his approach is to "calm inflammation, treat the factors that are causing ageing in the skin, but using a really minimalistic approach and keep it simple for people so that they really understand why they're using things. I find if people understand what they're doing a bit better, then they're more likely to comply longer term, which gives you much better results."
Adding a range of active ingredients like acids can complicate your skincare by stripping back the skin's protective barrier, Jack says, and "go from being a benefit to the skin to kind of tipping over into inflammation".
The "microbiome" is like a protective forcefield around the skin, he says, and is made up of bacteria and viruses that live on the skin. "When you're overwhelming it, these bacteria become disrupted."
"When you do that, the skin then becomes very sensitive to anything that you're doing, even kind of touching it can cause sensitivity and make up can cause it to become irritated."
His first port of call is to add in antioxidants, he says, which treats pigmentation and lowers the pH of the skin to support the microbiome.
"We found that people with burns or larger inflammatory conditions, that to really support healing, you need to use a lot of beneficial antioxidants and also all the substrates of repair", he says.
After that, of course, is SPF – a must-not-skip step for anyone, regardless of how sunny the sky is on a given day. Finally, his last step is a night cream with a gentle retinoid in it. "There's quite a lot of oxidation on the skin and the skin is renewing itself overnight, so it's important to support it in that process."
Another key part of his routine is supplements, which work on the same complaints from the inside out. "In normal healthy skin, about 70% to 80% of the skin won't actually benefit from the stuff that you put on topically", he explains. He thinks of the supplements as an "insurance policy" toward skin health.
Having worked in skincare for 14 years, it's clear Jack is coming from a science-based background, so I wonder how he feels about the onslaught of celebrity skincare ranges that have been released in recent months?
"It's important to have knowledge of why you're doing what you're doing to the skin and why you're using certain things", he says. "If it's a celebrity launching something, they'll be launching something that's based on either white label or proprietary formulas that maybe haven't been thought through as much."
For example, he says, "the ingredient mix is not the optimal quality coming from a non-medical background".
With his years in medicine he says, "I don't in any way sound arrogant about it, but you do understand a bit more about the physiology of the skin, how much to use, when to stop with ingredients".
With a host of famous faces lining up in his Harley Street clinic for the latest in treatments, I was especially eager to hear what he thinks will be all the rage in a year or so. "Bio-stimulator" treatments are set to be the hottest ticket in town, he says.
"Profhilo, Morpheus8, these sort of things that can almost bio-hack your own skin cells to repair themselves, more so than overdoing botox and fillers. That kind of look and way of doing things is hopefully a trend that's dying off. People want to look a lot more natural."
Of course, all the treatments in the world aren't going to counteract a poor lifestyle, and Jack confirms this: "Probably more than 70% I would say comes from your lifestyle."
"Drinking plenty of water and taking lots of antioxidants in your diet is really important. Avoiding glycation from eating lots of sugary things and inflammatory animal based things is also important."
It couldn't be too easy now, could it?
