Skincare Product Recommendations

[itsyagirlmelisa]

Hello!

I hope everyone is doing well!  I have a combination skin type, with an oily T-zone and dry patches on the rest of my face. I also have dark spots around my mouth that sometimes become flaky. Do you have any recommendations for dealing with these issues?

[corn26]

Do you use retinol at all? Because overuse can also cause the skin to  become dry and flakey.  

I suffer from dry skin and your problem may simply be that your moisturizer is too lightweight. I saw another commenter mentioning barrier repair and I think the SkinFix moisturizer may be a good product to combat both. Some other good moisturizers are Inkey List peptide moisturizer, CeraVe's hydrating moisturizer, or Naturium's ceramide rich moisture cream. 

I believe someone else mentioned the First Aid Beauty Toner & I find it's great for my dry skin.

Also if you have an oily T-zone then you could just apply a lightweight moisturizer on that area while using a more hydrating moisturizer on your dry patches. When applying skincare in the mornings, it helps to use less product on the areas that tend to get oily as well. 

For the hyperpigmentation and dark spots there are a few actives that can help with this. You could either use tranexamic, mandelic acid or ferulic acid. I would take a look at some products and see what's best suited for your needs. 

Recommendations: Farmacy brighten up toner (tranexamic acid), The Ordinary (mandelic acid, tranexamic acid, resveratrol 3% & ferulic acid), Inkey List (mandelic acid or tranexamic serum).

Hope this helps

[theinnerjungle]

Sounds like hyperpigmentation! Dry/flaky skin could also be helped by reducing exfoliation if you’re incorporating salicylic acid/aha bha in your routine right now

So I had a similar issue, fixed it by targeting three different areas:

1. Repairing moisture barrier - used first aid beauty oat toner, inkey list hyaluronic acid, first aid beauty ultra repair moisturizer for CTM. This helped me a lot with my combination type skin. 

2. Hyperpigmentation - used olehenriksen vit C serum before the moisturizer after the hyraluronic acid serum for the first year. My skin is prone to breakouts so whenever that happened, I paused the serum and used tretonin cream overnight to reduce acne

3. sunscreen - to protect my skin from dark patches. I work from home but have sunscreen on all the time.