From Lemon Juice To Apricot Scrub: Here Are The Worst Skincare Sins I’ve Committed
They say that hindsight is 20/20. I say that hindsight makes me cringe deep down to my core.
Like many other young women, I’d more or less sell my soul for clear, glowing skin. But honestly, selling my soul isn’t half as bad as some of the stuff I’ve tried along the way.
Believe me, when I say skincare sins, I’m not being dramatic. I don’t just mean, “I can’t believe I used such stripping cleansers! I’m so glad I learnt to be gentle with my skin!”
I mean I did some dumb shit I saw on Pinterest and YouTube that any dermatologist would smack me for.
Luckily, I’ve escaped relatively unscathed and now coddle my skin with the tenderness of a newborn baby. But, if you adopted any of these habits on a regular basis then you could easily damage your moisture barrier, cause scarring, and even give yourself a nasty chemical burn.
So, believe me when I say, it’s not skincare-snobbery – it’s just a bad f**king idea.
Here are the worst skincare sins I’ve committed (and we do NOT recommend trying these at home).
Straight up lemon juice on the face
This was my first foray into skincare, and I remember doing this at maybe 11 or 12 after reading some natural herbal book from the ’90s that my mum kept among our cookbooks.
Most of it was fairly standard, like:
- Steam your face over a bowl of hot water for an at-home spa
- Mix sugar and honey to make a body scrub
- Use olive oil on your cuticles
But I remember seeing that “lemon juice is great for evening out skin tone”.
In my tiny, empty brain, I figured that this was just the cure I needed for my annoyingly rosy cheeks.
So, I grabbed a lemon from the fruit bowl, juiced it, and applied it with a cotton ball twice daily.
Needless to say, it stung, made my skin more sensitive, and I would like to go back and smack the lemon out of my hand.
Nowadays I use a 20% Vitamin C serum to help with my post-inflammatory erythema, so I understand where the book was coming from… but I’m more than happy to have graduated into proper cosmetics.
Retinol + eyebrow wax
This is one you always think you can get away with. You think it won’t happen to you, it can’t be that bad, and you really need your brows done for this weekend – just this once you’ll try it…
And then you’re missing a chunk of skin along the orbital bone. Look, I’ll include my own reference picture if you don’t believe me.
Retinol and Accutane are awesome for clearing the skin, but it is preferable to keep that skin on your face. Because of the way they work to increase cell turnover, they leave your skin very fragile, fresh, and delicate.
That’s why it’s extra-sensitive to the sun and you need to be cautious when exposing it to acids, lasers, and wax designed to terrorise your hair follicles.
DIY skincare
I would have done anything to get rid of my cystic acne – and Pinterest has thousands of supposed all-natural cures that Big Skincare doesn’t want you to know.
Luckily, I never got into the “lemon juice + baking soda + charcoal + essential oils” kind of DIY masks. Anything that doubles as a drain cleaner can stay the f**k away from my face, thanks.
What I did do, was chuck some cinnamon, turmeric, and yogurt into a bowl with some honey and apply it to my face for 20 minutes.
I was hoping to lighten acne scars, but it didn’t do much apart from staining my bowl, towel, shirt, sink, and face yellow. It was great fun when my roommates got home and I had to explain why my face was permanently tinted a chic kind of pastel yellow.
Not quite sure why I didn’t anticipate that, but you live and learn.
Apricot Scrub… more than once
If you know, you know.
Many aestheticians and dermatologists warn against using physical exfoliants and scrubs – especially ones that use apricot and walnut shell powder.
A great analogy I heard is that no matter how finely you crush glass, it will still just be very small pieces of glass that will tear your skin if you rub it on your face. In fact, there’s a whole class-action lawsuit against a particular St Ives Apricot Scrub for the micro-tears it gave users.
That’s not the worst part. The worst part is I used this scrub for months, found out about the lawsuit and all the issues associated with physical scrubs, then went ahead and bought another tube anyway!
Any damage inflicted on my skin is honestly fair game at this point.
A routine consisting of bar soap, apple cider vinegar, and shea butter
My aesthetician visibly winced when I told her this one – and I really don’t blame her.
I remember getting into a rabbit-hole of Twitter threads devoted to how different users cleared their acne. African black soap, apple cider vinegar as a toner, and straight-up shea butter seemed to work for a lot of people who swore that beauty brands were just out to take our money when natural ingredients worked just as well.
Normally I’m not a gullible gal, but the slew of before and afters were what swayed me – people with skin as acneic as mine or worse, now glowing and clear with barely a pore in sight.
Suffice to say, the bar soap and undiluted apple cider vinegar completely stripped my face whilst the highly comedogenic shea butter doubled down and clogged my pores resulting in yet more acne.
Amazing!
So, forgive me skincare-enthusiasts, because I sinned A LOT. All I can say is I’m sorry, I know better now, and my poor, traumatised skin has received a lot of well-deserved pampering since.