Cleansing: An Important First Step in your Skincare Routine
If you want to start off your daily skincare practices right, the best first step to take is using a cleanser. A cleanser is a special face wash that sets the stage to allow the rest of the products you use to work as effectively as possible.
A high-quality cleanser gets your face clean without stripping it of its natural oils or employing harsh, irritating chemicals to get the job done.
So, what kind of cleanser should you use to start off your beauty regimen? When you are deciding what ingredients to include in your skincare routine, vitamin C is one that you definitely do not want to overlook. Vitamin C is the perfect active ingredient to serve as the basis for your daily cleanser.
If you want to know more about vitamin C face wash and what it can do for your skin, keep reading. We’re about to get in-depth and dig into the science behind vitamin C’s benefits for your skin and what makes it such a powerful ingredient to use on your face.
How Cleansing Works
Cleansing is the first step in morning and nightly skincare. A cleanser is meant to gently get rid of dirt, excess oil, and any other unwanted particles that might gather on your skin after a night in bed or a long day. It might be a little bit nasty to think about, but your skin can pick up a lot of gunk over time.
Cleansing helps to clean your skin, preparing your face to receive the beneficial ingredients in the other products you are using as part of your beauty routine.
In addition, if you wear makeup, cleansing can help to gently remove it without needing harsh chemicals or a lot of scrubbing. Leaving makeup on your skin can lead to clogged pores, irritation, and even breakouts, and using a cleanser to remove your makeup at the end of the day is one of the best ways to refresh your skin and give it a chance to breathe.
You probably have noticed at this point that gentle is a keyword when it comes to cleansing. The goal of using a cleanser is not to vigorously scrub your face clean. Instead, you are letting the active ingredients in your cleanser do the hard work to remove dirt and oil from your skin.
What is Vitamin C?
Before we get further into the benefits of vitamin C face wash, let’s first talk about what vitamin C is, and why your skin needs it.
Vitamin C is an antioxidant, which makes it a friend of your skin and your body as a whole. Antioxidants benefit your body in several key ways by balancing out the impact of molecules called free radicals.
Free radicals are molecules in your body with unpaired electrons. These molecules want to marry their unpaired electrons with other electrons. To do so, they attempt to “steal” electrons from the molecules within the cells of your body’s various organs and systems, including your skin. Your body generates free radicals naturally, but their activity can increase in response to many environmental or lifestyle factors. These factors include air pollution, alcohol and tobacco use, junk food, sun exposure and more.
Free radicals are always present in your body. However, too many of them can leave your body in a harmful state known as oxidative stress. As you get older, your body tends to become much more vulnerable to this state and to the damaging effects of free radicals.
When your body is in oxidative stress, there is not enough antioxidant activity in your system to counteract the amount of free radical activity. This tipping of the balance in your body gives free radicals the potential to harm and weaken your skin cells. Oxidative stress can slow down your skin cells’ production of collagen and elastin, two proteins that your skin needs to stay looking young.
Why Your Skin Needs Antioxidants Like Vitamin C
Without enough antioxidants in your system, your skin can become deficient and slow down its production of collagen and elastin. Without enough collagen and elastin, your skin becomes less flexible and looser, giving way to visible wrinkles, lines and sagging. These age-related skin issues often arise in large part as the result of increased oxidative stress on your body as you get older.
Insufficient amounts of collagen and elastin can also leave your skin more vulnerable to sun damage. Overexposure to the sun when your skin is weakened and unprotected can lead to hyperpigmentation (dark spots), sunburns, and even skin cancer in some cases.
All this information may feel a bit overwhelming. Fortunately, the main point is that antioxidants like vitamin C are here to help you in your fight against the damaging effects of oxidative stress on your skin.
Using antioxidants like vitamin C topically can support your skin’s overall health, helping you retain a bright, even, youthful complexion.
How Vitamin C Helps Your Skin
When you use vitamin C as an ingredient in your skincare routine, you are supplying your skin with much-needed antioxidants, which have numerous benefits for your skin’s health and appearance.
Vitamin C is known for its helpfulness in evening your complexion and brightening your skin, and the antioxidant property can help to lessen the appearance of dark spots, sun damage, and other similar blemishes.
Inconsistencies in your complexion can take a toll on your confidence, and an ingredient like vitamin C can be a big help in making you feel great when you look in the mirror.
Thanks to its ability to help you achieve a bright, even complexion that you feel great about, vitamin C is the ideal ingredient to include in a cleanser.
Our vitamin C cleanser pairs the antioxidant with other beneficial ingredients, including aloe vera, which can soothe and calm your skin, and rosehip oil, a naturally-derived ingredient that is also packed with antioxidants.
How to Use Vitamin C Cleanser
When you get started with using vitamin C cleanser, you will be amazed by how simple it is to use. Using cleanser is a refreshing beginning to the skincare routine that you practice in the morning and night, and it can become a comforting ritual to start and end your day.
The goal of starting your skincare routine with a cleanser is to get rid of any debris on your face that might clog your pores or get in the way of your skin’s absorption of the ingredients in your skin treatments.
In addition, since you rinse off cleanser after applying it but leave many other products on after they are applied, you want to always begin your beauty regimen with any products that are rinsed off.
Cleanser is best followed by a gentle exfoliator, another product that you will rinse off after use. Exfoliator works to get rid of dead skin cells and refresh your skin. Some exfoliators work differently from others, with many containing rough, harsh particles that are designed to physically remove dead skin from your face. These harsh exfoliators are definitely not ideal for your skin, and can leave your face more irritated and worse for wear than before.
Instead of using a harsh exfoliator, opt for one that does not contain large, rough particles or requires vigorous scrubbing to work. You do not need to be rough on your skin to exfoliate it – in fact, you should never be rough on your skin at all!
After using a cleanser and an exfoliator, the rest of the products in your skincare routine can follow. Follow cleanser and exfoliator with the lightest of your skin treatments before moving on to heavier ones. This means using your toner and serums before applying moisturizer, eye gel and sunscreen. The lighter products in your skincare routine need to be absorbed by your skin to work. When you apply heavier products first, you can inadvertently hinder your skin’s absorption of the lighter ones.
To maximize the benefits for your skin, follow this order with your skincare routine: rinse-off products (cleanser, exfoliator), lightweight products (toner, serums), heavier products (creams, gels, moisturizer, sunscreen).
This order helps your skin absorb helpful products and prevents the ones that should stay on your skin from being rinsed off during your process.
Ready to Reap Vitamin C’s Beauty-Boosting Benefits?
If you are looking for the best possible vitamin C face wash to include in your skincare routine, look no further than goPure’s Vitamin C Cleanser, with rosehip oil and aloe vera. This cleanser is gentle, sulfate free and suitable for all skin types. It makes the perfect beginning to your morning and night skincare, and can leave your skin refreshed and supplied with the antioxidants that it needs to stay healthy and ward off the harmful effects of free radicals.
It’s an all-natural, high-quality skincare treatment that you can feel great about using!
Sources:
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5367f9z0
https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.biochem.77.032207.120833
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0065323305700139