Charcoal masks are all the rage right now. Charcoal is the biggest beauty trend in 2017!
Removing hair and getting lots of blackheads out.
We can log onto Facebook or check out YouTube & there are hundreds of people posting their silly pictures and videos peeling off those charcoal masks.
Such a great concept, right?
WRONG!!!
Let me pull out my expert cap right now and tell you that anything that pulls out hair is removing skin too!
You are removing blackheads, but those charcoal masks are doing more damage to your skin then you think.
If a product or mask is painful or uncomfortable, that is a red flag! Your skin is telling you it doesn’t like what you’ve applied and doesn’t want it on.
Our skin is the largest and smartest organ on our bodies and it will immediate react to something that doesn’t belong.
When I say it’s a smart organ, what happens is we remove the mask & get that soft, plump skin left behind.
That is actually your skin REACTING to the charcoal mask. You have just removed to many layers of skin cells in the top layer, called the Stratum Corneum.
The Stratum Corneum is our skin’s protective barrier layer and consists of 8-20 layers. If more than 1 of these
layers is removed, the skin has to immediate work to protect it’s top layer.
If the top layer becomes damaged or removed, the skin swells to protect the Dermis (the 2nd skin layer) from harm.
This is extremely important to know, because the Dermis is home to our collagen, elastin, blood vessels, lymph, etc. If this layer gets damaged, we age quickly!
The Stratum Corneum layer is designed to protect the Dermis, so it MUST remain intact.
Say you remove too many layers of the Stratum Corneum, now what?
Now your skin is swollen and “plump” as a reaction to the damage done. This swelling is creating a layer of protection for the Dermis.
It’s ok if this happens on occasion, but if we are doing something like this on a regular basis, our skin is always in a state of repair and inflammation.
Over time, this inflammation ages our skin quicker than if we just left it alone.