Skin Nerd: D-I-WHY? Homemade skincare and the pitfalls
There’s something irrefutably satisfying about doing it yourself, especially when Ikea makes it so bloody easy to be a successful handyperson. With the movement towards clean living, which often appears closer to anti-chemical living, homemade or DIY skincare is back on the rise.
In Bella Thorne’s recent video for Harper Bazaar’s Go To Bed With Me series, the former Disney actress details her skincare routine, including a homemade scrub and no SPF. The routine itself includes a homemade sugar, lemon juice and olive oil scrub applied to dry skin that Bella states she takes everywhere, a coconut oil, honey and cherry mask and all-natural products created by a woman named Jenny.
I’d like to note that although I personally believe that results-driven skincare is more beneficial for the skin than all-natural skincare, it’s entirely possible that Jenny is a practising aesthetician and may indeed know what she is doing. Most natural skincare isn’t for me, and I feel that you’re best off opting in to “chemical” skincare, but I simply don’t know enough about these products to give an official yea or nea.
What I can discuss are the scrub and mask that Bella Thorne makes herself. You know from having touched sugar that it is a rough, sharp granule. Now, I am always against scrubs, grits and mechanical exfoliation, but I am especially against sugar scrubs as they are particularly tough on the face. Combine that with potentially skin-damaging lemon juice and you’ve got a recipe for red, irritated, sun-sensitive skin.
Lemon juice is super acidic, being full of citric acid. In skincare, it is added to formulations by professionals who understand what it does to the skin. With lemons, you will never know exactly the amount of citric acid in any given lemon so it is unreliable in that respect, and particular chemicals in lemons lead to problems with skin pigmentation and are known to cause blistering when introduced to sunlight.
I wish these were the only issues with Bella’s concoction, but there are more. She actually uses the scrub around her eye area — the eye area has the thinnest skin so it is the most delicate, meaning even more damage, and being in a tub, it is being exposed to air all the time. She says that she adds water to loosen it up, and this is a major no-no. With no air-sealed pump or preservatives, this water basically invites bacterial growth to take place.
As noted, there is no daily SPF in her routine. You should be wearing SPF on the daily to protect your skin from both UVA and UVB rays, no exceptions, and if you do choose to include a DIY lemon juice concoction (obviously not recommended), it becomes even more important.
There is a positive to the routine! As noted by Susan Yara, an aesthetician that reviewed Bella’s video on the Mixed Makeup YouTube channel, the mask isn’t actually the absolute worst. Although comedogenic coconut oil can congest skin, especially those who have suffered from acne as Bella has, honey is actually a fantastic humectant ingredient, which means it draws moisture towards it, helping to hydrate the skin. The cherries add probably very little, bar the possibility of a stained red face.
The be all and end all of it is that DIY skincare nearly always does more harm than good. Not all sources on the internet care about doing what is best for your skin, but theskinnerd.com (always biased), labmuffin.com and carolinehirons.com are all great places to head for information.
The Nerdie Pick: Biofresh Probiotic Ultra Delicate Cleansing Milk
Rather than DIY-ing probiotic skincare by putting yoghurt on your face, the Biofresh Ultra Delicate Cleansing Milk will balance and soothe without leaving you smelling like something a kiddo has left in their school bag for too long.
It’s not over the top expensive, it’s beloved by practically every single person we’ve ever recommended it to and it’s fantastic for both entry-level skincare users and those who have tried everything under the sun, because it is suited to the majority of skins.
