However bear in mind these simple three skin care types are not always as straightforward as they seem, if you need a better diagnosis of your skin care type we recommend a consultation with a medical aesthetic practitioner, a dermatologist, or a skin care professional. If you can’t venture out for any health or safety reasons many professionals and clinics are now offering on-line consultations.
Before investing in any product, do some research on the Internet, read the recommendations of others who have already used it and always check the instructions for use, Try to choose products that have evidence based claims, and read real reviews from actual users, you’ll find plenty of real reviews on forums and beauty related blogs and vlogs, steer away from endorsed reviews or paid for advertorials as these will be biased, the recommendation and reputation of a skincare brand is always best sourced from the people that have really used a product.
Skincare in lockdown
Vanessa L Brown, Managing Director of VL Aesthetics says ” lockdown has been a difficult time for many reasons, but alongside all the other pressures – or perhaps because of them – skincare has been another issue we’ve all had to worry about. Many men and women will have noticed how their skin has changed during the lockdown – I know I have – and there are many reasons why this might be happening.
Lockdown has disrupted our normal routines and we’ve spent more time indoors over these last 3 and a half months. Add to this all the extra stresses people are experiencing and it is no wonder a lot of people are having skin issues with more breakouts than they would normally have. At the same time many of us have spent a lot of time on Zoom and video calls which has had the added effect of giving us more time to reflect on our appearance. A Zoom meeting is all well and good, but you don’t normally spend meetings staring at your reflection.
My Friday night Zoom catch ups with the girls go on for hours and that’s a long time to be staring at your own face. So it’s no wonder that people have been thinking about skincare a lot and spending more on skincare than they have on makeup during the lockdown. Thankfully we’ve still been able to help people. Usually we would get people in for a face to face consultation to discuss their treatment options, but we couldn’t do that during lockdown so we launched our virtual clinic concept. We were able to invite people online to do remote consultations which took around 30 minutes during which we could ask them questions about their concerns and recommend some simple things they could do at home, along with a medical skincare routine. We were able to keep the consultations free, only charging for any product that customers needed. People have really responded to the idea and we had a lot of enquiries – from existing customers, new clients and from as far away as London (we are based in Carlisle, 6 hours away!) We did everything we could to be supportive, considering the worrying times we’ve been living through.
Consultations were followed up after two weeks to check that the recommendations were working for people and we sent texts to people just to reach out to people and check they were OK. I think people also felt comfortable talking to us from their own home, particularly so if they have conditions such as rosacea or acne which they are self-conscious about. We have all had to adapt to a new way of doing things and that’s involved talking people through home treatments that they can do on their own at home peel (which of course is still very different to an in clinic treatment but still better than nothing!).
People have had to do more for themselves during lockdown and I’m glad we’ve been able to support them. It’s been a new way of working and one that we’ll continue with even though we can now open up our clinic for business once again.”