For Sparkling Clear Skin, do you Give yourself the best of the Basics?

It's easy to look at all the impressive skincare products lined up on shelves all around the beauty section; the fact that they are over-the-counter doesn't mean that you don't need to exercise some reasonable common sense and scientific product knowledge before you put your money down for them. Here's a way to get started.

For better or worse, your skin is unique; no one else has the same skin as you, and the one way you can make skin care work for you would be to resolve to try to understand the way your skin works. What you need to do is to start a process of establishing a relationship with your skin - you couldn't just pick off the best products on the shelves and expect them to work as advertised. The products are just one half of the equation; the other would be your skin. Experimenting to find the exact product that answers the specific needs of your skin is what great skin care is all about. But no matter what you do, there are a few basic rules to successful skincare that you can't let yourself be distracted from. Here they are; use them for basic skin health and clarity.

Your skin needs to breathe; with the layers of creams and assorted lotions we use on the skin, there is a pretty good chance that dead skin cells could adhere to the skin, and block your pores. For this reason, every beauty regimen begins with facial cleansers and exfoliants. Exfoliants are abrasive products, and you'll need to work out a schedule for how much of it your skin can take. The way you use it, you aren't supposed to rub the particles into your skin; you only need them for how they succeed in loosening up and washing out the old skin.

There is another way to clean your skin up too - retinoids. You'll find that retinoids come in all kinds of levels of strength - from the over-the-counter Differin, to the superstrong Accutane that only comes on prescription. Retinoids are great for their anti-aging effects too incidentally, though you use them mainly for cleaner pores, exfoliated skin and general clarity of the skin. But while exfoliants are products you use no more than a couple of times a week to strip out any buildup of dead skin, a proper face wash is what you need everyday. You might think that you use face wash for that super fresh look in the morning alone; you'd be mistaken though; an overnight wash is far more vital to the health of your skin, to get it all clean to enable it to recuperate through the night (even if you don't have any activities planned afterwards).

Once you have these basics settled in properly, the most important first step you could take would be the use of sunscreen. It's just a simple fact of nature - ultraviolet rays damage your skin. Since there is no getting around this, it couldn't hurt at all to keep some sunscreen in your bag, and keep replenishing your coat through the day. There's a little skin care myth that seems remarkably resistant to efforts at dispelling here. The myth is that the effects of the sun are good for the skin, because acne is known to dry up with a bit of sunshine. While this is true actually in the short run, the moment your body realizes that your skin is drying out from the heat, it will only react by putting out more skin oil, and aggravating the situation. Try a great sunscreen, and never leave home without it.

So acne, understandably, gets people so worried that they'll try anything. Actually, there are some pretty good skin clarifying products out there that could help you. You don't have to believe in old wives tales for it either. If you have a problem with body acne, that can be pretty tough; you could bathe your acne in isopropyl alcohol, and try antibiotics. If this doesn't seem to work though, you'll need to have to have your dermatologist look at it. There are mild antibiotics for the skin that work as a preventative if you're interested. Try salicylic acid gels. They aren't expensive, and they'll strike the acne right at the source. If you find you can't get a salicylic acid gel that suits you, you could try grinding up aspirin to apply to the affected area. If that won't work, you'll need lotions with benzoyl peroxide; the bacteria hates the stuff so much, they can never get accustomed to it. And if you're getting really desperate, did you ever hear that acne wilts when faced with oral contraceptive pills? A few days on these, and you should probably be seeing some improvement.

Once you get your skin looking the way you want it, be sure to maintain things the way they are. And whatever treatment you decide to take up, make sure you give it time to work - least a couple of months.