Beauty stores and retail shops are opening, but looking through thousands of products and talking with salespeople isn’t the best approach for everyone. Online stores are a great place to learn what beauty products fit your needs. Keep reasoning for some tips on buying beauty products online for new users.
1. Think About Your Goals
Are you trying to start a beauty routine? Is improving skin health your goal?
You should keep your goal in mind when you begin the process of looking for beauty products online. This will not only help you narrow your search but also introduce you to products and tools you didn’t know about. Did you know they are much better ways to apply skincare treatments than with your fingers?
Whether you want to reduce your breakouts or combat oily skin, the right system is out there for you.
2. Know Your Skin Type
There are five basic skin types as classified by skincare professionals. Here are the characteristics of each:
Oily skin: Your skin feels and/or looks greasy, and the feeling gets worse throughout the day
Dry skin: Your skin feels tight, flakey, irritated, scaly or rough, scaly, flaky, itchy or and looks “dull” or flat
Combination skin: Your face is oily in some spots (the T-zone is most common) and dry in others, such as the cheeks
Sensitive skin: Sensitive to new products, allergies, fragrances, or environmental factors, and your skin gets red, irritated, dry, or flakey easily
Normal skin: Not acne-prone, overly sensitive to new beauty products or changes in the weather, and your face does dry out or become oily during the day
To determine what skin type you have, pull your hair away from your face, wash with a neutral cleaner, and see how your skin reacts in 30 minutes to 1 hour. You can use tissues or blotting paper to see if your skin is oily or simply evaluate it in the mirror.
The feeling of your skin is likely to fluctuate given the time of year, exposure to heat or cold air, changes in hormones, as well as natural changes with aging. If you have “normal” skin now, it could change somewhere down the line. Make sure you keep tabs on how well your products are working for your skin at different times.
3. Build a Routine
The basic steps of a skincare routine typically include toner, serum, eye cream, cleanser, an AM moisturizer, sunscreen (or moisturizer with SPF protection), and a PM moisturizer. When looking online for toner, keep your skin type in mind because certain ingredients can cause your skin to dry out or produce more oil. Serums and eye creams are essential products for skin hydration.
For moisturizers, you’ll want an AM (or morning) moisturizer and PM (nighttime) moisturizers because the texture and ingredients are different. Moisturizers made for daily wear are thinner, so you can wear them under your makeup without your face looking cakey or greasy. On the other hand, nighttime creams are often thicker and more likely to contain glycolic acid, retinol, and Vitamin C.
Buy beauty products online can be a gamble, so when they arrive, don’t use them all at once—especially if you have sensitive skin. You’ll want to introduce the new products gradually and start with a patch test. For a patch test, use one of the new products on a patch of your skin and leave it alone for 24 hours.
If that patch of skin becomes inflamed, burns, or flakey, don’t continue using the product. Certain types, especially those that contain retinol, tend to cause some redness and itchiness at the beginning. See a dermatologist to talk about the best steps for you.
4. Read the Product Descriptions
The labels on products can be pretty confusing if you don’t know what you’re looking at, but there are a couple of ways to approach it. Look closely at the order of names as they’ll be listed by highest to lowest concentration. These first five comprise most of the product, and the ingredients following it are far less abundant.
As mentioned earlier, retinol can cause some mild irritation when you first start using it, so this is something you should be aware of on the label. This is an especially important step when you are comparing beauty products online as a new user.
Buying Beauty Products Online Made Easy
You don’t need to spend hours behind a makeup counter or try to walk through the maze of aisles in a beauty store to get the right beauty products for you.Spa Sciences makes buying beauty products online easy and provides the tools to get happy, healthy, radiant skin without having to spend hundreds.
Check out our products and more helpful advice on our blog!