Skin care: Tips for healthy skin

Don't have time for intensive skin care? You can still pamper yourself by acing the basics. Good skin care and healthy lifestyle choices can help delay the natural aging process and prevent various skin problems. Get started with these five no-nonsense tips.

1. Protect yourself from the sun

One of the most important ways to take care of your skin is to protect it from the sun. A lifetime of sun exposure can cause wrinkles, age spots and other skin problems — as well as increase the risk of skin cancer.

For the most complete sun protection:

• Use sunscreen. Use a broad-spectrum sunscreen with an SPF of at least 15. Apply sunscreen generously, and reapply every two hours — or more often if you're swimming or perspiring.
• Seek shade. Avoid the sun between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., when the sun's rays are strongest.
• Wear protective clothing. Cover your skin with tightly woven long-sleeved shirts, long pants and wide-brimmed hats. Also consider laundry additives, which give clothing an additional layer of ultraviolet protection for a certain number of washings, or special sun-protective clothing — which is specifically designed to block ultraviolet rays.

2. Don't smoke

Smoking makes your skin look older and contributes to wrinkles. Smoking narrows the tiny blood vessels in the outermost layers of skin, which decreases blood flow. This depletes the skin of oxygen and nutrients that are important to skin health.

Smoking also damages collagen and elastin — the fibers that give your skin strength and elasticity. In addition, the repetitive facial expressions you make when smoking — such as pursing your lips when inhaling and squinting your eyes to keep out smoke — can contribute to wrinkles.

If you smoke, the best way to protect your skin is to quit. Ask your doctor for tips or treatments to help you stop smoking.

3. Lack of exercise:

It makes you fat of course and that introduces very many more health problems but it also plays a role in the lack of luster in your skin. There isn’t enough flow of blood which is essential for the oxygen to travel across the body to each cell including the skin cells.

4. Bad eating habits:

The skin needs different nutrients and those fast food joints you love are not where you will find it! Feed your skin the right food and it will respond with that lovely look you want. Tit for tat!

Now that you know what you need to stop doing. Here are the tips for healthy skin.

How to get healthy skin:

Tip 1: Minimal makeup

Ladies, can you please minimize makeup usage? It is really not necessary to always use a blush, concealer, foundation, mousse or whatever it is. It may add a fine coating to your skin making it glowing skin, but what about your real skin? Is it really glowing? No matter how expensive the brand is, it damages your skin to a large extent. We are not asking you to throw them off your shelf; keep those away for special days. The rest of the days, tone and moisturize your skin, use sunscreen. Let your skin breathe.

Tip 2: Face cleansing

This has been told by all beauty experts umpteen times when asked how to maintain healthy skin. Even if you are too tired after a long party, cleanse all dirt and makeup from your skin. Your face needs to be cleared of all the chemicals in makeup. The makeup acts as a tight mask on your face keeping your facial pores clogged. If you go to bed with all these makeup on, you’ll wake up the next morning with a huge embarrassing pimple.

Tip 3: Slather on sunscreen

Sunscreen is a must for your skin. The rays of the sun are harmful beyond thoughts. Skin cancer, premature aging, skin rashes all of these are caused when your skin gets too much exposure to the sun without any protection.

Use a big dollop of sunscreen with SPF on your face whenever you are going out to protect your skin of all the anomalies caused to your skin by the harmful sun rays. Do not care for the season or whether the sun is out today or it’s cloudy. Use sunscreen always. Beauty experts also advise using sunscreens even if you are at home or inside a car or even if you on a flight. Celebs swear by SPF measured sunscreen to keep skin healthy and free from any diseases or ugly tanning.

Tip 4: Exfoliating face

All the healthy skin tips for women say that you should exfoliate your face at least twice a week. Scrubbing your face will rid your facial skin of all the dead cells that might have clogged your pored leading to acne breakouts, blackheads and whiteheads. Scrubbing your face will also improve your complexion, adds a glow to your skin and also clears your skin of all toxins. Don’t keep your skin scrubbing daily, it will make your skin look even drier.

Tip 5: Moisturize

Yes, other than keeping yourself internally hydrated, also use a good moisturizer to feed your skin. Moisturizers do not add a great deal of moisture by themselves but they lock in the present moisture and are hence essential to keep your skin hydrated. After a bath, make it a routine to moisturize your face daily to keep it hydrated. Before bedtime, place a towel soaked in warm water on your face and keep for some time. This way the pores of your face will open allowing the moisturizer to soak into your skin.