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In This Article:

• Recommended Gentle Products
• Irritation: The Silent Problem
• Be Gentle!
• Avoid the Following...
• Common Irritating Ingredients to Avoid

We cannot stress this enough: irritation and inflammation are bad for skin—really, really bad. Daily assaults such as unprotected sun exposure, hot water, and applying skin-care products that contain irritating ingredients generate an irritant response. The result? Skin's repair process becomes faulty, collagen breaks down, and the skin's surface is weakened. For those with oily skin, irritation triggers nerve endings in the pore that activate hormones which increase oil production, leading to enlarged pores!
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Recommended Gentle Products

Irritation: The Silent Problem

You can be irritating your skin and not even know it because irritation, more often than not, doesn't show up on the surface of skin. Even though you can't see it, irritation is taking place beneath the skin's surface, causing damage, mutating skin cells, destroying collagen, and making large pores and oily skin worse.

You can get a clearer idea of how this underlying, hidden damage from irritating skin-care routines or products takes place by imaging what happens to skin in reaction to unprotected sun exposure. Being exposed to the sun day after day from early childhood results in cumulative, serious damage taking place beneath the skin's surface but it doesn't show itself on the face until after many years of unprotected exposure.

Be Gentle!

For the overall health of your skin, anything you can do to treat it gently is a very good thing. Treating skin gently encourages normal collagen production, maintains a smooth and radiant surface, helps skin protect itself from environmental damage, reduces oil production, and makes pores smaller. We guarantee you will see potentially dramatic improvements to your skin simply by avoiding irritating products and learning to be gentle.

Avoid The Following...

• Overly abrasive scrubs (such as those that contain aluminum oxide crystals, walnut shells, or pumice)
• Astringents containing irritating ingredients (alcohol and menthol being the prime offenders)
• Toners containing irritating ingredients (alcohol and menthol being the prime offenders)
• Scrub mitts (think Buf-Puf)
• Cold or hot water
• Steaming or icing the skin
• Facial masks containing irritating ingredients (watch out for fragrant essential oils and polyvinyl alcohol)
• Loofahs
• Bar soaps and bar cleansers

Common Irritating Ingredients to Avoid

(These are of greatest concern when they appear in the beginning of an ingredient list.)