Knowing your skin type is essential if you want to preserve and enhance your skin health and beauty. Besides choosing the best skin care and makeup products for your skin depending on its type, knowing how to determine your skin type helps you live a healthier, more mindful lifestyle. Not so long ago, we focused on learning how to find out if you have oily skin. Today we will elaborate on other methods and tricks to learn what type of skin you have to deal with for excellent care and makeup routines.
1. The Bare Face Method
Use a mild, neutral cleanser and wash your face with warm water, then pat dry. Leave your skin bare and wait for half an hour, then examine your cheeks, nose, chin, and forehead. Wait another 30 minutes and examine your face again.
- Oily skin: your face may shine on your forehead, chin, and cheeks
- Dry skin: your face may feel parched and tight on your cheeks, forehead, and around eyes
- Combination skin: your face shines on forehead and chin, but your cheeks are tight
- Normal skin: your face is not too oily, not too dry and it does not feel tight when you smile or make facial expressions
- Sensitive skin: besides feeling tight, your skin also itches or tingles
Depending on these results, you will learn what products to use and how to care for your skin on the long haul.
2. The Blotting Sheet Method
This is a method to mostly differentiate between oily skin and dry skin. It is a fast, reliable method that will show you exactly where your oily patches are, also giving you good clues on combination skin. First, cleanse your skin with a mild agent and warm water, pat dry and wait for an hour. Take a blotting paper and press it gently against your face, covering all your face areas, just as if you would want to make a mold of your face. Hold the blotting paper up in light and notice the oily deposits on it:
- Oily skin: the paper shows oily patches on your forehead, nose, chin, and cheeks
- Dry skin: there are little to no greasy patches on the paper
- Combination skin: there are some oily residues on the paper in the forehead and nose or chin areas
3. The Pores Inspection Method
Your pores are some of the most straightforward indicators of your skin type. Their size and clogging capabilities will give you solid clues on how you need to care for your face depending on its type. For excellent diagnosis, use a magnifying pores mirror and look at your pores with attention. You can back the results afterward by using a normal bathroom mirror as well.
- Oily skin: your pores are very large and they seem full of oily secretions, grime, dirt, and sweat. Use the bathroom mirror and take a few steps back, away from it. If you still see your pores from the distance, you clearly have oily skin.
- Dry skin: your pores are very small. They are not visible neither on the magnifying mirror nor the bathroom mirror at a normal distance.
- Combination skin: your pores are large and clogged around the nose but small, unnoticeable on the cheeks, and other facial areas. If looking in the normal mirror at a normal distance shows the same results, you have combination skin.
- Normal skin: your pores are not visible with either mirror. To differentiate between normal skin and dry skin, check on how your face feel (if it is tight and parched, it is dry).
- Sensitive skin: your pores’ sizes vary from normal to large, but in order to infer the correct diagnosis, you need to mind how your skin feels (it itches, stings, etc.)
In Conclusion…
Learning how to determine your skin type is extremely important for your future skin care routines and beauty/makeup choices. Moreover, understanding what your skin requires in terms of hydration and moisturizing also leads you to a path of mindful lifestyle choices, including dieting.