When choosing your skin care products, it’s wise to consider them along several dimensions. Although this sounds kind of boring, it actually is important, because taking the time to do this will save you money and give you better results.
When looking to purchase skin care products, first consider your skin type. Is your skin oily? dry? sensitive? aging? This will give you a broad category of products to choose from, and will determine the specific products you should focus on.
For instance, if your skin is oily, you probably want to focus more on cleansing and toning than moisturizing. if your skin is dry, you might focus more on moisturizing than toning (and so on).
Once you’ve determined your skin type, it’s time to think about what you want the product to do. Do you want it to cleanse your skin? Tone your skin? Treat wrinkles or fine lines? This, too, will determine what kinds of products you should spend money on.
After this, you want to take a look at any special skin problems or skin conditions you have. These may impact what kinds of products you can choose. For example, if you have dry skin, and want to cleanse it, but have found most soaps too harsh, you want to find a product that will cleanse gently without using too many preservatives or mineral ingredients.
Finally, once you’ve determined the answers to those questions, you then want to take a look at the ingredients list and aim to get the product with the fewest number of total ingredients, especially if your skin is sensitive.
Sounds challenging, perhaps, but it’s a good method to follow to insure you’re getting the most value from your skin care dollars.
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Bruce Wansink, a professor of Marketing at Cornell University is engaged in some interesting research- that of determining the hidden cues which determine how much we eat. These so called dietary persuaders can have a huge impact on our eating behavior.
He’s already found that people grab more M&M’s from a bowl with multicolored M&M’s, that people tend to eat less popcorn during light or comic movies, compared to sad or gloomy ones, and that most people don’t really know how they’re feeling when they are eating.
Of course, what you eat can have direct impact on your health, and, also, on your skin.
Researchers like Wansink show that it’s not about counting calories or fat grams, but, instead, about learning what hidden cues we are responding to on the days we overeat.
Wansink estimates that each of us makes more than 200 food decisions per day, most of them without conscious thought.
He believes that a better approach to dieting and nutrition would be to find ways we could easily cut 100-200 calories a day. One way this could be done would be to hide favorite foods and eat from controlled portion containers, rather than jumbo sized bags (which tend to persuade us to eat more.)
Recently, an article in the American Journal of Public Health reported the results of a study of more than 10,000 teenagers and their exposure to advertising about smoking.
The study found that television ads sponsored by tobacco companies which are supposed to discourage teenagers from smoking actually don’t do this, and, instead, may actually be sending the opposite message- that smoking is cool and something they should do.
In this study, researchers examined the reach of tobacco-company sponsored ads and whether they were seen by 12-17 year olds in about 80% of U.S. households from 1999-2002.
Combining this with a survey of 8th, 10th, and 12th graders in 48 states yielded no correlation between viewing of anti-smoking ads and intended or actual smoking behavior.
Stated another way, watching these anti-smoking ads didn’t change the teen’s behavior or beliefs about tobacco at all.
Smoking, of course, is both a health risk and a skin hazard. Free radicals and pollutants in cigarette smoke can lead to skin damage and aging.
