Take Care of Your Largest Organ: Your Skin Here's How...

If you have sisters, you probably found out quite early that girls' sleepovers where not all just pillow fights and massage trains. They also entailed strange rituals replete with green slimy face masks and hair products. While women are indoctrinated early in their lives to strive to contain their t-zones and exfoliate dead cells, men, as with many things, take a while to catch up. Now this is not an insult, but merely a testament to boys' mental immunity against marketing. Er, well, marketing about skin care, anyway.

Whether you secretly experimented with your sister's products or not, as you get older, you might realize that not only is it okay for straight men to take care of their skin, there are shows and product lines and Web sites devoted to it. Don't you feel almost compelled to stand up and take notice of what is going on on the surface of your dermis?

When it comes down to it, skin care is not really all that difficult. I am going to break it down into 4 types, 3 steps, 2 notes of caution, and some special advice for you athletic-types out there.

Four types
Before you figure out what products you need for your skin, you need to figure out what type of skin you are dealing with. Do not just assume that if you use the strongest product that you are attaining the cleanest, healthiest skin. Your skin struggles to retain it's own natural balance of oils. You want to clean away the EXCESS oils that are going to clog your pores. If you try to strip away all of the oil in your skin, your skin will react by producing even more in order to compensate for the loss. Nobody wins that war.

There are four major types of skin: oily, normal, dry and sensitive. If your skin is normal, it is just that: never to oily or too dry, although it might tend to naturally fluctuate a bit with the seasons. When looking for a soap or cleanser, look for one that contains lanolin.

Oily skin is thicker than normal and dry skin and tends to be pretty hearty. It also tends to have medium-to-large pores, however, and is therefore more prone to blackheads, whiteheads, and acne. Look for a cleanser that contains salicylic acid. Dry skin is thin and flakey, especially in colder climates. It is easily irritated. You need a soap that moisturizes, such as glycerine or silicone.

Sensitive skin reacts to any abrasives, including weather (sun, wind, extreme temperatures), products, chemicals, and additives such as perfumes. Keeping this in mind, look for hypo-allergenic products with no added perfumes, and those which contain propylene glycol.

Many people have skin that combines two or more of these types. The most common combination is an oily t-zone (forehead, nose, chin) and dry everything else. If you have this type of skin, treat your t-zone as oily skin and the rest of your face as normal or dry. How you ask? Well, three easy steps.

Three Steps
The first step to healthy skin is cleanser. You need a soap or liquid cleanser, containing the ingredients specified for your skin type (above). Use this cleanser once or twice a day, depending on your need. You will have to experiment here. Many men follow their cleansing regimen directly following their morning shave. Other prefer the nightly regimen, to cleanse their dermis of the day's grime. And some do both. Find your fit.

The next step is finding a toner. While the cleansing washes away the excess oil and dirt from your face, toner exfoliates the layer of dry cells that your skin naturally sheds every day to leave only the shiny, healthy new layer to glow. There are two types of exfoliants. Mechanical exfoliants are products that actually use a gritty substance such as oatmeal or nut shells to sand off the outer layer of dead skin cells that settle on your skin, while chemical exfoliants use mild acids such a alpha- or beta-hydroxies (often derived from natural products such as fruit) to slough off dead skin cells.

The final step is moisturizing, which serves two purposes. Moisturizers serve to both lock in existing moisture but also draw moisture out of the air to absorb into your skin. Your choice of moisturizer depends on your skin type. Oil is a natural moisturizer, but if you already have oily skin, look for an oil-free moisturizer. If you have sensitive skin, obviously, look for a perfume-free, hypo-allergenic version.

Two notes of caution
The biggest enemies to your skin are the sun and smoking cigarettes, the more dangerous of these two being the sun. If you really want to protect your skin and your health, wear a sunscreen or a sun block. And wear it daily. UVA and UVB rays are constantly battering your skin and its elasticity, so use a broad spectrum sunscreen that blocks both. Look for PABA-free sunscreens , which may cost more, but will not as easily irritate your skin.

Atheletes
If you are the type of guy who works out ,or engages in sweat-producing sports, here are a few tips to reduce the effect on your skin:

* Cleanse before your workout, so that your sweat isn't redistributing the grime from your face into your pores

* Cleanse before you go to bed so that bacteria forming form sweat doesn't infest your dermis while you sleep

* Drink lots of water"”this goes for non-athletes as well. Keeping your water level high helps you retain a natural moisture level in your body that will help you retain a healthy glow.

There. Now, you have no reason to take care of your skin. Broken down into steps, all you need to do is experiment to find the right products and regimen for you, and the healthy glow of your youth (or the glow you wished you'd had) will cling to you like yesterday's jockeys.

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