Top Tips for Teen Skincare

Alice Hart-Davis is an award-winning beauty journalist who writes for newspapers and magazines including the Daily Telegraph,the Daily Mail, London’s Evening Standard, and Red magazine, among others, and is mum to three lively adolescents. She is creator of www.goodthingsbeauty.com, a range of gentle, effective products with superfruit beauty boosters designed to make the most of young skin.

Here, she shares her advice as both beauty writer and mother of teens for how to approach skincare for your teen.

TOP TIPS FOR TEEN SKINCARE

Start early

Ideally, children should start looking after their skin by the time they go to secondary school, since all skin – dry and oily, male and female – will benefit from gentle, regular cleansing and moisturising – and the younger they start, the better their skin will look as it gets older. A regular routine will also help ‘normalise’ skin.

That can be a tough call, though, as most teens are blissfully unaware that they might need to look after their skin until disaster strikes, usually in the form of spots (see below), so the ‘in real life’ answer to when to start is, whenever they are ready.

Keep it simple

Alice with her teens

Teen skincare doesn’t have to be complicated or expensive. In the evening, cleanse by massaging on a gentle cleanser, then wiping this off with a flannel wrung out in hot water. If skin feels dry afterwards, give it a dab of moisturiser. In the morning, a quick splash of water and a layer of light moisturiser with an SPF15* is all it needs.

Unless your child has a problem with their skin, that’s plenty. They can exfoliate – gently – once or twice a week, and use a face mask if they like, for fun, but the less you muck around with young skin, the better.

Take action on spots

Reassure your teen that spots are a side-effect of the hormonal surges of puberty –not the result of eating the wrong food or staying up too late (though stress certainly doesn’t help keep skin clear).

If they are already cleansing regularly, move onto using special anti-spot products; look for face-washes that will reduce skin oiliness without stripping the skin, and anti-spot gels to pop onto offending blemishes. And if that doesn’t help, get professional help. Your GP can prescribe stronger antibiotic pills or lotions to tackle spots, or can refer you to a dermatologist for further help. To a doc or a derm, spots are not something that you need to put up with; they’re a problem to which there’s a variety of solutions.

(*I’m a firm believer in the need for SPF, all year round, particularly on the face, since it is low-level, everyday exposure to UV rays that stacks up over a lifetime to give us age spots and wrinkles by our 50s, and can raise the chances of developing skin cancer. If you want to make sure you get enough vitamin D, which is made by the body in response to sunshine, show the sun your arms and legs for a few minutes three times a week during the summer months but protect your face).

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