Exfoliating Can Make You Look Instantly Younger

How is that possible? Think about it in comparison to the skin on your heels before you get a pedicure. The built-up, dead layers of skin on your heels usually looks dry, rough, discolored, scaly, and lines are really obvious. Once that layer is removed, your heels immediately look smooth and unwrinkled! Of course, what causes calluses on your feet is different than what causes skin cells to build up on your face, but the same benefit of exfoliating heels holds true for your face; you just have to be far gentler. With well formulated AHA or BHA exfoliants, that's easy to do!

Should I Use a Scrub to Exfoliate?

Scrubs are certainly an option for exfoliating your skin, but they have limitations you don't have to worry about with an AHA or BHA exfoliant. Scrubs only deal with the very top, superficial layer of skin while most of the unhealthy, built-up skin cells are beyond the reach of a scrub. What is most problematic is that many scrubs have a rough, coarse, uneven texture that can cause skin damage by tearing into the skin as it abrades away the surface, causing tiny tears that damage the skin's barrier. Scrubs often cause more problems than they could possibly solve.

If you do want to use a manual scrub, you can simply use a gentle washcloth with your daily cleanser, which works just as well to exfoliate the surface of skin as any cosmetic scrub you can buy. As a bonus, washcloths are softer (thus gentler) and of course they don't contain pore-clogging ingredients that oily, acne-prone skin doesn't need.