What If You Stop Using Skincare for a Week?

We get it—middle and high school are stressful! Harder classes, sports, arts, endless homework, friends and family... the list goes on and on. You might start to feel that things like skincare are far down your list. Is it really that bad to skip skincare for a day? Or two days? The next thing you know, a week has gone by since you’ve done your skincare. What does this mean for your skin?

Your Skin’s To Do List

You might not realize it, but your skin has a daily to do list too, and skincare is what helps your skin check those boxes. In order to understand what would happen if you stopped using your cleansers and moisturizers, you need to understand what your body’s largest organ is doing on a day to day basis.

The skin has a built in protection called the skin barrier. This acts like armor and helps to block out things like bacteria and pollution from your environment. It also helps to keep moisture in, to prevent your skin from getting so dry. If your skin can do all this on its own, then why do you even need to use skincare?

Skincare Tools

Unfortunately, we don’t live in a perfect world, so even with your skin’s built in mechanisms, it needs some extra tools to get its to do list checked off. The skin barrier can become damaged, from changing hormones and environmental factors like pollution and bacteria, to emotional stress, hydration and diet, and even bad habits like skin picking and over exfoliating. It’s not possible to fully avoid harming your skin barrier, so skincare is what helps to restore its natural defenses. Now that we know that, we can start painting a picture of what would happen if you skipped out on skincare entirely.

First Few Days

Initially, you may not notice a lot of changes after you quit your skincare routine. But, there are a lot of subtle changes happening that will have a big impact later. Your skin is likely starting to lose moisture, which can make your skin start to feel tight and itchy. This is called transepidermal water loss. You may also start to see flaking and rough spots, which can also make your skin appear dull. Another thing that will start to change is the oil levels in your face. Your skin may start to overproduce oil to try and combat the new dryness, or, it may struggle even more to produce oil, causing even worse dryness. 

Long Term

By day 7, you’ll be starting to see noticeable effects from not using your skincare. If your face is producing more oil to try to compensate for the new dryness, you’re probably starting to get a lot more acne, and without using a cleanser, this problem will get worse quickly. High oil levels can trap excess contaminants and seal gunk into your pores. Usually, you would wash those away with your daily cleanses, but since you aren’t doing that, the acne will continue to get worse and worse.

For those whose skin is struggling to make enough sebum, irritation and redness will be a big problem at this point. The continued dryness makes the skin feel uncomfortable and painful, and the flaking and cracking can increase the risks of infection, because bacteria is able to penetrate much deeper into your skin.

Bouncing Back

You probably aren’t planning to intentionally skip out on your skincare. But what about those times where you were too tired and simply forgot for a few days? Is your skin doomed forever? No! Thankfully, your skin is very resilient, and getting back to your regular routine as quickly as possible will help your skin get back on track. Make sure, however, that you don’t respond to a few missed days by suddenly overloading on a ton of exfoliators and serums. Most teens don’t need more than a basic 3-step routine with a clean cleanser, moisturizer, and sunscreen. Using products that are new to your skin, or further damaging its barrier with harsh exfoliators, can actually make the problem much worse. Stick to simple, trusted routines!