Cool for the summer: ingredients to look out for in your summer skincare

Summer, according to me, is the most challenging season of the year. In Mumbai, you have two seasons practically speaking--summer and monsoon. You can no longer feel the winter cold possibly because of climate change, so skincare is geared more towards being sun-proof and summer-friendly.

One of the best things to do to your skin topically is to hydrate it and keep it cool. Mists are a great way to do that. And if you keep yours in the fridge, even better! Another way to keep the skin cool is to use products that contain cooling ingredients, such as peppermint, eucalyptus, cucumber, green tea, aloe vera, bamboo, rose and possibly many others. The products can be anything from cooling masks to hydrating toner mists. Here are some of my favourite cooling skincare products:

1) Fresh Spa Imperial Caviar -30 degree Cooling Mask
This hybrid between a night cream and a face mask is my holy grail skincare product. It contains arctic peppermint oil, which gives an instant cooling and toning effect together with other ingredients such as caviar and snow cladonia found in the most pristine Russian landscapes. 

2) Aroma Magic Activated Bamboo Charcoal Mask
This face mask is loaded with Himalayan clay and bamboo charcoal powder along with cooling ingredients such as panthenol, red sandalwood and aloe. Lately, this has become my favourite skincare product but for a very different purpose. Watch this space to know what I use it for. :)

3) Aloe Derma After Sun Repairing Mask
This aloe-enriched gel face mask is uber cooling, especially when you leave it in the fridge and use it after you return home from a hot, humid day. It also contains other cooling super ingredients such as mint, chamomile and purslane, a herb that is also used in salads! Sadly, I don't think Aloe Derma sells this mask anymore. I tried finding an active link for it but couldn't come up with anything.

4) Leejiham Tea Tree Toner Mist
Leejiham is a renowned Korean skincare brand and this spray mist is my first purchase from them. This power-packed mist contains 70 per cent tea tree extract along with other skincare goodies like niacinamide, witch hazel, cucumber, aloe, grapefruit extract, orange fruit extract, apple fruit extract, lemon fruit extract and lime fruit extract. A skincare cocktail, in short!

5) Whamisa Organic Flowers Eye Essence
Whamisa is another well-respected Korean skincare brand. Their packaging is drool-worthy but what's most exciting is that they carry some really well-formulated products that work. I had never used eye cream in my life so buying this was a gamble. I did not know what to expect. However, in the first use itself, I noticed how the eye cream left my eye area feeling cool and tingly, not in a menthol sort of way but in a very subtle and refreshing way, thanks to cooling ingredients like aloe and green tea.


More information about cooling skincare ingredients can be found here.

REVIEW: Tosowoong Osory Oil Emulsion

One of the constant challenges for an oily-combination skin type is to find the right kind of moisturiser. You want something light (not greasy/shiny) and if a moisturiser gives you more than just a beautiful after-feeling, you have yourselves a winner!

A strong contender
The strong contender in my stash is the Tosowoong Osory Oil Emulsion. Tosowoong is a leading Korean beauty brand, famous for creating products using the best natural ingredients such as tea tree, aloe, propolis, camellia, bifida ferment, and many others.
 
Now, to the most interesting part of the product name--osory! Osory is Korean for badger, the furry animal that resembles a beaver and a weasel. Apparently, the moisturiser contains oil derived from the animal--don't ask me how, as there is no information documented about this online, or at least in English. Now, Koreans are known to derive natural ingredients from creatures such as snail (its mucus is known to be anti-inflammatory), bee (its venom is known to stimulate collagen), red algae and crustaceans, which are known to produce astaxanthin, a super antioxidant. But many Korean brands are happy to show you that they cultivate snails responsibly. So, let's assume for a minute that our friendly little badger is not harmed as well.

What does the moisturiser contain
Okay, now that we have the controversial part out of the way, let's focus on why someone would use badger oil in skincare. While there is not much research available online about the benefits of badger oil, there is some indication that it contains unsaturated fatty acids, which when applied topically help repair the moisture barrier of the skin. I have spoken about the moisture barrier previously here, and why it's important to maintain it. Repair your moisture barrier and you will have taken care of acne--it's as simple as that.

This moisturiser also contains squalene, a natural oil that is very similar to the sebum that our skin produces. Squalene is anti-bacterial and also helps compensate any oil loss from the surface of the skin, thus helping repair the moisture barrier.

Another ingredient in this moisturiser that helps repair the barrier is meadowfoam seed oil, which is an antioxidant. It's worth mentioning that all of these three oils are super light on the skin, which is essential for an oily-combo skin type.

Packaging
The product comes in a sturdy, non-fussy bottle with a screw-on lid. The bottle is not very practical as it has a slightly wide mouth so you typically end up with more quantity than you need. A pump style bottle would have been more practical.

Price (and er, fragrance)
For me, using this product has been a mix of yays and nays. Let's start with the nays. Apart from the price, which ranges between 22 USD to 32 USD (roughly 1,450 INR to 2,000 INR for 150 ml), which could be a nay for some people, the product has a strange smell. I cannot even begin to describe it but I can tell you what it's not--it's neither floral nor fruity, it's neither medicinal nor grassy, it's something else entirely. If that's how the badger oil is supposed to smell, then I get it.

Performance
Once you get over the fragrance part, there is good news waiting for you because the product works. To begin with, you only need a little so that justifies the price. It is absolutely 100% non-greasy so perfect even for summers. When I tested this initially, I did not have major acne to test it on, so please excuse me when I say that I cannot attest to the acne-reducing claim. However, the ingredients should technically work in reducing acne. What I did notice, though, is that it made my face less oily than usual, which is not a surprise because the ingredients are meant to do exactly that. By adding the right kind of oils to your skin's surface, it stops the skin from overproducing oil. When the skin has the right amount of oil, pore clogging is down to minimum, thus reducing acne. I would imagine that you'd need to use this regularly along with using the right kind of cleanser (not the oil-stripping foaming washes) to see sustained results.

Availability
I actually won mine in an auction on Tosowoong's own ebay store. So, I ended up paying 13 USD for 150 ml. But last I checked, the ebay store no longer holds auctions. However, the store continues to sell the product at the full price of 32 USD. You could also get it for cheaper on websites like RoseRoseShop.

Skinsleuth Says:
While the moisturiser is a downer in terms of fragrance, it is light enough to use while maintaining the essential oil-moisture balance. For these reasons, I would recommend the Tosowoong Osory Oil Emulsion.

Dehydrated yet oily—my skin was as confused as I was

There were times in my life, in the past 5-6 years, when more than one person beautician and dermatologist told me that my skin was dehydrated. There were multiple times in my life, in the past 6-10 years, when more than one person told me that my skin was troubled with whiteheads.

Now, with the latter, you can pretty much tell when someone is suffering from it—although most people confuse sebaceous filaments with whiteheads—but I digress. Remind me to broach that subject later. With dehydration, however, I was always left wondering what those people truly meant. Being the snob that I was am, I never really questioned them or worse, assumed that their knowledge was flawed and that they were saying so only to push a product or service in my face.

How wrong was I?

Whether their intentions were to sell something or not is irrelevant today but what they tried to tell me didn’t prompt me to action, unfortunately, or even thought for that matter.

How I was ‘shown the mirror’ through a camera lens!

Fast forward to a year ago and post various vacays that I took with my husband, I was finally ‘shown the mirror’. While browsing through the countless vacay pics clicked by his advanced camera, I finally saw that my skin was indeed in an awful state. The lens magnified every single bump, dry patch and pigmentation that had called my skin its home.

While I never suffered from severe acne or pitted scars, whiteheads (we’ll stick with that term for now) were the bane of my life and I came to accept that. But it was only after reading skinandtonics’ blog post on moisture barrier that I truly understood what those well-meaning folks meant when they said ‘dehydrated’.

To put simply, dehydration is a condition where your skin feels dry and parched in spite of being oily. Confused, right? I was puzzled too when I first tried to wrap my head around the concept. If you’re still wondering what it means, a rundown of its symptoms may help.

·       A dehydrated skin will typically show dry and uneven patches, especially on the cheeks or chin, coupled with an oily T-zone and possibly some level of acne.

·       Dry, oily and combination are skin types, whereas dehydrated is a condition that can happen to any of these three skin types.

·       Another symptom of dehydrated skin is the lack of glow…not the JLo kind, but a sort of inner glow that one usually associates with babies and wise men.

The vicious cycle of oil and moisture

So, it was established (with a few additional research-y clicks) that my skin was dehydrated. What it basically meant was that my skin’s oil and moisture balance was askew.

Let me explain how that happens:

·       When the skin is deprived of moisture, it compensates for it by stimulating the sebaceous glands, forcing them to pump out more sebum or what we call as oil

·       Overproduction of sebum makes the skin oily (duh!), which leads the person to grab the nearest oil-stripping cleanser and/or scrub to get rid of the grease/shininess

·       Overusing harsh cleansers and scrubs not only get rids of the excess oil but also strips away what little moisture is remaining in the skin

And thus, we complete the vicious cycle where no moisture leads to more sebum, which leads to using a harsh cleanser, which again leads to zero moisture.

Enter Google and the tiny little spark called curiosity

With this fascinating piece of knowledge planted firmly in my head, I obsessively began searching for solutions. Kerry of skinandtonics is a guru when it comes to research on skincare products so reading up her must-have product recommendations seemed like a no-brainer.

But that is where things started to get interesting. Google is such a devil in that it knows exactly which buttons need to be pushed, tempting you to leave the shores of ignorance behind and sail away (for hours at end) to the land of radiant wisdom.

During my initial research, I came across jolse.com, the first website I landed on during my search for products that would set the oil and moisture balance right…and possibly help with my whitehead situation too. And products did I find! From Benton’s Snail Bee Essence and Aloe Propolis Gel to Skinfood’s Black Sugar Scrub Foam and CosRx’s A-Sol, I was taking baby steps towards a well-defined goal.

In my future posts, I'll jump right in to talk about the things (products and routines) that worked for me--and the ones that didn't. Stay tuned!

How Korean beauty filled a skincare vacuum in my life

There was a time in my life—not too long ago—when I used to not use a moisturiser or sunscreen. This wasn’t too far back in time but as recent as last year! Many people who live in humid climates will agree with me when I say that thick creamy sunscreens can make one feel greasy and leave a ghostly white cast, so my decision to not wear one was understandable. But what surprises me today is that apart from the icky, white-cast sunscreen, I completely neglected my skin. Things like ph levels, moisture barrier and dehydration were as alien to me as well…aliens!

So what changed in the past few months that now I’m sitting here typing it all out in a stream of consciousness baring my soul (and skin) for you all? What changed so much that I want to stop you in your tracks, grab your hand, make you sit down and explain why you shouldn’t be committing skin blasphemies?

K-beauty…that’s what happened!

While I credit my increasingly improving makeup skills to the ultimate makeup guru—Lisa Eldridge, popular for turning the likes of Kate Winslet, Kiera Knightley and many others into effortless beauties, my class on skincare kick started with Korean beauty or K-beauty as it’s popularly known amongst skincare aficionados.

Earlier this year, I was introduced to K-beauty but I don’t remember exactly how. It could have been a mix of Asian beauty blogs, a random Google search and/or the idea of buying a face wash—the only thing I could relate to skincare until then. But I do remember where exactly this obsession began. If you’re into K-beauty you’d probably know about jolse.com and many other such websites that sell Korean beauty products worldwide. Prior to this, I was known to occasionally log in to a couple of beauty prods sites in India for the random body lotion or face pack purchase, but one toe into the K-beauty waters and I knew that I was in for a deluge!

Before I knew it, one click led to another—one review led to a few (hundred) others—skin types turned out to be as basic as the alphabet and I could see the mecca of ageless, spotless and radiant beauty beckoning me over.

So, over the next few posts, I plan to share the significant milestones that I completed in my skincare journey and I can see, looking back, that I have come a long way. This is the beginning to my skincare story and the lessons I’ve learnt and the tips that I can confidently share with you all. Stay tuned!