My Skin Care Journey
Skin care… Skin care… Skin care… It’s a very touchy subject for me. Anyone who has my skin type will understand the struggles and frustrations that I have with skin care. Skin care is super important so why does it have to be so hard?
I have had rosacea for as long as I can remember. I believe that photo evidence goes back to when I was about 9 years old and in the 5th grade. Now as most of us know, how we look doesn’t start becoming a priority until about 7th/8th grade and high school. For me, how I wanted to look didn’t actually become a priority for me until maybe junior year of high school. I was a little late to the game, I admit, but I never thought that I was particularly pretty or could be pretty until that year. At this time though, my skin didn’t really bother me. I thought that in order to be pretty, all I had to do was wear makeup and that’s exactly what I did. I never went overboard but the simple use of concealer, eyeliner, and mascara made a huge difference to me.
The rosacea didn’t start to become a huge problem for me until sophomore year of college. I had moved to the mountains where I went to school and the weather up there wreaked havoc on my face. The redness became more prominent which made me more self conscious and I actually began to notice the dryness, itching, and stinging which was really uncomfortable and distracting; hence, beginning my skin care journey, and what a rough journey it has been and still is. At the start of this journey, I was in college which meant that I was broke all the time, and I remember standing in the skin care aisle of Walmart for 30-45 minutes, every trip I made, staring at all of the products trying to decide which one would suit my skin type. I still hadn’t had a full understanding of what exactly my skin type was but what I did know was that it was red and dry.
For a while, I used Clean and Clear face wash and moisturizer which made a noticeable difference, but only for a little while, and I still wasn’t happy with the results. When I was on winter break that year, I went to Texas (where my parents had just moved) for the month. Winter in Dallas is still winter so the cold, the flying, and the dryness of the air, once again, took a huge toll on my face. My mom and I researched and researched for what I could use to at least calm down the redness and prevent the itching. We tried everything from essential oils to Cetaphil products to Olay products and they either wrecked my skin more or didn’t do anything at all. By the time we got to the Olay products, we had no more money left to try anything else and it had helped a little bit so I had to stick with it.
The next few months brought anger, tears, and frustration from hours of research. Why couldn’t anyone give me a straight solution or a straight answer to what products would help me the most? I then discovered that not everyone with rosacea experiences the same symptoms or has the same triggers as me. This fact alone, makes the search for products that will work for me all that much harder. Let me just say, I feel as thought I have tried almost everything under the sun from essential oils, a huge variety of skin care products (from the drugstore ‘cause ya girl is still broke), and I’ve even been tested for food allergies. As we are here right now, the search continues, and while I have currently settled on a skin care routine that at least minimizes the redness, dryness, itching and stinging more than any other routine that I had in the past, the symptoms are still there and I’m still not happy with the results that I am seeing. I’m still on the hunt and hopefully one day, I will be able to write a post telling you guys that I have found the holy grail of skin care for my extremely sensitive, extremely dry, itchy, red skin. *Click image for links to products shown below
What’s your skin type and are you still on your skin care journey or have you found the fountain of eternal youth? (If you have, send me directions to its exact location.)
