Skin Care Advice

The skin has the inbuilt capacity to protect itself from environmental stimuli. That is why most animals do not need to take care of their skin. Human beings even, in the prehistoric period, did not take any special care of their skin. But as civilisation progressed, new developments and need for skin care items began to acquire importance. There are, however, many misconceptions even among the most educated and intelligent people, which lead people to all kinds of wrong means for skin care. Further, with the advent ofbeauticians and the manufacturers of cosmetics, wrong concepts are being passed on to the public through television advertisements, apparently to promote their services and sales of their products respectively. This situation is further worsened by the pseudo-experts who ostensibly appear to be imparting information and advice to the public, but, in fact, are misguiding them.

Some people fear that soaps harm the skin, and thus avoid the use of soap during bathing or apply the soap on their body but not on their face. There is no scientific justification for such an attitude. People who do not use soap, may still remain normal because plain water has the ability to clean the skin even though not so efficiently,and the skin has the inbuilt capacity to deal with environmental onslaughts. Nevertheless, such people are at a greater risk of developing a disease as compared to those who clean their skin more efficiently with soap.

The correct procedure for bathing, therefore, is to wet the skin with water, apply an adequate quantity of soap, rub the skin with fingers to produce adequate lather ensuring that all the areas have been rubbed with soap and as the lather persists, wash it off with sufficient quantity of water.

To prevent this dryness, soap manufacturers use excess of fat or other moisturising agents in the manufacture of soaps and claim that their soaps do not produce dryness. This, however, is absurd. The action of soap is to remove the fat from the skin and not leave the fat on the skin. If a soap does not remove all the fat from the skin, it means that the cleaning process is incomplete and the skin is dirty. If it is at all necessary to counteract the dryness of the skin, then the fat or the moisturising agent should be applied after the washing, and not during the washing.

Similarly,the practice of applying an oil before bathing is equally absurd. If there is more oil on the skin, it will require more soap to remove it and if all the oil is not removed, the cleaning is going to be incomplete.