Beautiful skin for your wedding day is about hydration, exfoliation, and relaxation.  Two or three weeks before your wedding day, set up a regiment that will have you sporting your freshest face for your wedding.  I wish it was all about vanity, but truly anyone who has had to deal with serious acne understands how painful and uncomfortable breakouts can be.

Hydration

Drink water with lemon juice to help hydrate your body and flush out toxins each morning. Minimize, or avoid all together, all fluids that are complicated with artificial ingredients and sugars.  Now would be a great time to develop a taste for a morning cup of warm water with lemon juice and maybe some ginger.  To sweeten, consider honey, not sugar.

*It might be a great time to minimize and eliminate processed foods from your diet and start maximizing fresh vegetables and fruits.

Also, start using a quality daytime and a quality nighttime lotion for your face.  Those with oily skin and acne prone skin have a love/hate relationship with moisturizers, especially with SPF.  It is easy to blame breakouts on them even when they claim they won’t.  In truth, they can attract problems, but these problems can be minimized with gentle cleansing throughout the day with something as natural as witch hazel.  Then reapply fresh face lotion with SPF if needed.  Gentle is the key word, as you don’t want to abuse your skin.  I’m hesitant to say wash your face three times a day as that may lead you to over drying your skin.  Plus, it seems to be a little much.  But to swipe some cleansing, gentle toner over your face in the between time of morning and night, that seems reasonable.  It also feels good.

Exfoliation

Each day, even using something as soft as a wash cloth, wash your face with a gentle cleanser.  You don’t need to scrub hard or with something that is abrasive.  All that is needed is steady pressure and round movements.  You just want to remove dead, dry skin cells and unclog pores.  And you really want to buff more than scrub.  Take your time along your jaw line, temples, and hair line before going for your t-zone (forehead, nose, cheeks, and chin).  You will be less likely to abuse your delicate skin by saving the trouble zones for last.

Relaxation

While using facial masks, give yourself the luxury of 15 to 20 minutes to relax every other day or so.   Use a facial mask with charcoal to draw out toxins, something with tea tree oil to get rid of any deeply embedded bacteria, and something with cotton seed to minimize pores.  Most stores carry a line of face masks, like Que Bella, which are inexpensive.  One of their packets can contain two, maybe three treatments, depending on how heavily you apply.   For those of us with acne, clay masks and charcoal masks are very helpful.  They do all the things we need them to do without over drying.  After rinsing and washing the mask away, swipe a cotton pad soaked with witch hazel across your skin to get any excess mask off and to minimize pores.  Witch hazel will help even out skin tone as well, and it is so inexpensive and gentle that you can use it as often as you want without consequences.  So if it feels good just to freshen up with it, do it!  I like it chilled in the fridge to freshen up with especially on hot, muggy days.

After three weeks, your skin will be feeling and looking pretty fine, and on top of everything else, you just developed some healthy habits.

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