Natural Topical Anti Inflammatories for Irritated Skin
While it is of utmost importance that we eat an anti inflammatory diet to help keep breakouts at bay and keep our skin smooth, even toned and supple, it is also important that we use anti inflammatory types of topical products.
Why? Well, we don’t want to use products that irritate our skin even more with harsh chemicals and detergents – these actually PROMOTE inflammation. This is why we have some recommendations for natural, gentle acne cleansers that we feel help promote healing and smoothness as well as a reduction in any redness or irritation.
Some of the best anti inflammatories are antioxidants. This means things like topical vitamin E, argan oil, tea tree oil, lavender essential oil, olive and coconut oil, and other topical oils that contain large amounts of naturally soothing antioxidants seem to work the best when tending to overworked skin.
One of the recommendations for topical anti inflammatories has been rubbing ground up aspiring with a bit of water on the face. I never had too much luck with this reducing my acne breakouts, but some people do.
Try very hard to avoid things like parabens, sulfates, benzoyl peroxide and other harsher chemical types of ingredients. If the ingredient is several words long, for example, you probably can guess that it is a chemical concoction that isn’t so great for your skin.
I know a lot of the anti inflammotories I listed above are oils, and people who already have oily skin tend to shy away from this. That is totally understandable. But most of them are noncomedogenic. That means they do not clog the pores and lead to further acne breakouts.
If you use them minimally and don’t load them up on the face, they are less likely to cause pore clogging and you still can get the benefit of the antioxidant properties. You can also gain a lot of benefit from this if you also have aging skin, or perhaps even rosacea, which is consistently reddened and irritated, flushed skin.
It is perhaps even more important to apply topically anti inflammatory products for skin that suffers both acne and rosacea, since these are both inflammatory skin conditions.
November 23, 2011 at 12:15 pm Comments (0)

