The Secret to My Beautiful Skin

I get a lot of compliments on my skin. I’m not sure why, I’ve never thought that I had very good skin, as I’ve been fighting off red bumps since before I hit my proper teens, but taking good care of my face is the only thing that I have ever been ridiculously disciplined about doing. As an Organic Freedom (read my blog if you need proof of my utter laziness) this is, to me, a minor miracle. Really, it’s just that I’m exceedingly vain and if my skin didn’t need all this maintenance I would have given it up years ago.

I don’t think I have EVER not washed my face every night since my mom stopped doing it for me. Drunk, exhausted from a newborn, my wedding night, I have ALWAYS washed my face. My toilet might not have been scrubbed in six months, but my face? Flawless. Or at least always clean. Still, while I continue to be surprised and flattered by the compliments, perhaps there is something to my beauty routine.

Cetaphil. Oh, and I don’t use water. Water can be uneccesarily harsh and therefore aging. So I wipe off the excess with a towel. In the shower I’ll do a quick wash with whatever I have. I like to have Dr. Bronner’s Lavender soap, but nothing stronger than Dove. I have very sensitive skin. It’s very fair, one step up from the whitest you can go, and when you have very fair skin and in your twenties you start getting red bumps or extra redness on your cheeks and chin? It’s Rosacea. Are you white white, meaning no Italian or Mediterranean genes mixed in there? You’ve probably got Rosacea. Regardless, it’s worth a trip to the dermatologist while the insurance companies are still paying for them. Seriously. Forget all the expensive creams at the department or drug store, especially some of the ones that have peeling ingredients in them because that can just make the redness worse.

Besides if you go to the dermatologist they can give you the same stuff, and then you’re supporting someone who also has access to prescription medicines that ACTUALLY do something for your face. The best thing for Rosacea is this lovely drug called Finacea. It has a naturally occuring ingredient called azelaic acid which is an antioxident, antimicrobial and non-systemic and it will even out your skin tone and get rid of those bumps and redness. It won’t help with the broken capillaries, but that’s what make-up or lasers treatments are for.

Yes Classics and Funs, a trip to the dermatologist can be more expensive than drugstore acne medicine — but not always! — and all that medicine doesn’t work on Rosacea. And if you’re drug store medicine isn’t working on that adult acne it is probably Rosacea. Red patches? Rosacea. Plus the money you save in wasting it on products that don’t work is rather priceless in the long run. Besides, life is too long to go around with red, bumpy and splotchy skin with nasty cystal outbreaks from time to time. So, yeah, it’s worth it. In fact, when you look at how much Creme de la Mer costs I think it’s a bargain, plus it actually takes the redness away.

And yes I’ve done laser treatments and other barbaric and painful things to my face and when my cash flow improves I will probably do it some more. The results are nice. The methods are torturous. But applying Finacea twice a day? A snap. And it works. How do I know? Because the couple of times I have truly forgotten to clean my face, fallen asleep when sick? My skin lets me know.