A natural (and gentle) exfoliating ritual offers many wonderful benefits to the skin, include softening, removing bacteria and dead skin cells, unclogging blocked pores and supercharging the absorption of your skincare products. Exfoliating also promotes circulation, which aids detoxification and the flushing of toxins.
However, if overdone, exfoliating can also cause irritation, sensitivity, redness and damage to the skin.
To ensure you get the most of your exfoliation ritual, here are our top 4 tips.
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Be Gentle
For the most effective exfoliation ritual, we would recommend:
Avoiding: products with harsh chemicals or coarsely-ground ingredients, such as walnut shells.
Going for: products with finely-milled, non-abrasive natural ingredients such as clays, rice powder or natural fruit enzymes, such as our gorgeous Enzyme Face Polish.
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Don’t overdo it
We recommend incorporating an exfoliating ritual only once or twice a week to avoid damage to the skin’s protective barrier. Massaging your exfoliator in for a few minutes should suffice and will leave you with super-soft and youthful skin.
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Use your hands
Although reusable exfoliating devices can be really tempting, we would recommend avoiding these kinds of instruments (particularly if you have acne-prone skin). Instead, use clean hands to apply your product to avoid the spread of bacteria.
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Promote cellular turnover
Your skin actually works to remove dead skin cells naturally. To optimise and boost this process, we would recommend looking for ingredients such as Rosewood and Lavender Oils.
You can find Rosewood in our Cell Renewal Drops, and Lavender in our Clay Cleanser with Lavender.
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Avoid Microbeads
Added to skincare and cleaning products as a cheap, synthetic alternative to natural exfoliation agents, microbeads pose a huge threat to ecosystems, marine life and human health. Due to their minute size, microbeads are not picked up by the majority of water treatment systems, which means that they easily make their way back into rivers, lakes and oceans. We would recommend avoiding microbeads at all costs due to their dramatic environmental impact.
Click here to find out more about Sodashi’s Exfoliator Range.
