Here’s the truth about skin texture: EVERYONE has it and it’s 100% normal. In reality, no one’s skin texture is as smooth as it looks online! Skin texture is natural, but you can still improve the look for your skin and improve skin texture.
Whether you’re aware of it or not, social media is actually giving us a warped idea of what healthy skin texture is. There isn’t a selfie that gets posted without a little smoothing done to it in another app, or by beauty filters in the camera itself.
First, Stop Obsessing Over Skin Texture!
Put the magnifying mirror down. Of course, any normal skin texture is going to look exaggerated—it's a magnifying mirror, for goodness’ sake. NO one is going to be looking that closely at your skin (and you shouldn’t be either). How many so-called imperfections do you see when you hold a mirror arm’s length away? None, right?
When it comes to skin, some textures are completely normal, and some other textures show that there’s a little work that needs to be done. It can be hard to tell the difference when our only experience with skin texture is well, a total lack of it, thanks to overly airbrushed photos.
What Is Uneven Skin Texture?
Actual uneven skin texture appears, thanks to a few distinct issues that don’t all have the same cause. So how to improve uneven skin texture depends on the type of texture in the first place. We’ll go over the three most common uneven skin texture complaints: small tiny bumps, crepey skin, and rough-feeling skin.
How To Improve Small, Pimple-Like Bumps
These bumps can be scattered anywhere across the face, but they’re most common on the forehead and cheeks. They look a lot like tiny pimples, but they don’t ever seem to come to a head. If this sounds familiar listen up! This type of skin texture is called closed comedones (that’s the proper name that you’ll find in scientific studies).
A comedone is the technical name for a blocked pore, and by being closed, it means that the plug itself isn't open to the air. If you're still confused, compare this to a blackhead. A blackhead is an open comedone because, well, it's in an open pore. Fun (but gross) fact: the black color of blackheads is due to the plug oxidizing with the air and turning dark.
The way to improve closed comedones is to use a chemical exfoliation product, which should (eventually) dislodge and dissolve those plugs hanging around. In the long term, it should also speed up skin cell turnover, preventing the clogs from appearing in the first place.
Effective chemical exfoliating products to get rid of uneven skin texture are Alpha & Beta Hydroxy Acids (click the link for a refresher on what those are) and a clay mask. Even better, is to use two of those rolled into one, like an exfoliating Bentonite Clay Mask. It helps smooth everything out.
How To Improve Crepey Skin
You may be thinking—aren’t wrinkles more of an anti-aging thing, instead of a texture problem? Well, technically they’re both. But sometimes, wrinkles pop up in places that they can be easily prevented. This type of texture usually appears as wrinkles that seem to come and go—some days they’re there, some days they’re hardly visible. Here’s how to get a handle on them!
There are three main ways to tackle extra wrinkles that are causing uneven skin texture.
1. Hydration. When your skin is well hydrated, it tends to look plumper because the skin is full of water. This is a short-term effect and won't do much in the long run with wrinkled skin texture, but you'd be surprised how much it helps!
2. Peptides. Peptides are great ingredients that may reduce the look of wrinkles over time by doing two things—peptides can slowly freeze the muscle underneath the skin and they can encourage collagen production.
Freezing the muscle underneath your skin sounds a little dramatic, but it's similar to the results that most people are trying to get from botox injections (without actually getting injections, that is). These kinds of peptides are best for smoothing out the crepey texture in the undereye area.
3. Retinoids. Retinoids stimulate collagen production in the skin and speed up skin cell turnover. A great over the counter option for smoothing wrinkles because they are just so darn effective. But why is collagen so important to this type of uneven skin texture?
We all know that collagen is the underlying protein in our skin, right? That’s why boosting it is so essential to helping wrinkly, crepey skin texture. More collagen production = bouncier, firmer-looking skin.
How To Improve Rough Dry Skin with Exaggerated Pores
If your skin feels rough and you feel like your pores look huge, that only means one thing. Your skin is THIRSTY.
The gold standard of skin hydration, hyaluronic acid, will go a long way to helping with this type of skin texture. When applied, hyaluronic acid draws water into the upper layers of the skin. This does two things—it plumps skin right up (making pores look smaller) and softens the dried out upper layer of skin so that things aren't so rough and scratchy.
Hydration from a water-based ingredient like hyaluronic acid also pairs well with a facial oil to lock it all in. Oils also have the ability to soften and moisturize the skin, also playing their part to improve uneven skin texture.
If your ‘skin texture’ isn’t one of these three types, it’s likely that your skin is actually completely normal and healthy—and that’s something to have gratitude for!
