The 3 most common skincare mistakes revealed.

Tips and tricks for nailing the perfect skincare routine are all over the web and skincare routines tend to get longer and shorter every season. Hey, we get it: Keeping track of all this can get overwhelming and confusing. So let’s make it a bit easier and let us reveal the 3 most common skincare mistakes people make in their routines, so you can up your skincare game.

1) Not cleansing properly (or forgetting to cleanse at all)
With new masks, serums and spot treatments popping up every day, we seem to forget about the most important step in any skincare routine: Cleansing, aka washing your face from dirt, sweat and make-up. Simply splashing your face with water or a quick once-over with a face wipe will not do the trick. And remember: If you’re not cleansing the right way, the next steps in your skincare routine will be less effective. Why do we need to cleanse properly? Because it’s very easy for make-up, product and dirt to clog pores, which makes it hard for our skin to release dead skin cells and create new healthy cells. We even recommend a double cleanse, because a second round of cleansing will clean much deeper into the pores to remove impurities and leave your skin silky smooth. For example, start with an oil cleanser to remove oil-based dirt and make-up, followed by a foam cleanser or water-based micellar water to remove water-based dirt, like sweat. Feeling fresh and reborn!

Meet our cleansing heroes:
Lixrskin Electrogel Cleanser: Removes make-up and dirt, detoxes your skin and reaches inside the pores for a perfect deep cleanse. Lixirskin added a negatively charged electrogel to the formula. Why? Because negative and positive electrons attract. The negatively charged electrogel will capture and eliminate positively charged toxins and dirt for an unbeatable deep cleanse. The ultimate detox for your skin!
Bioderma Sensibio H2O: This French Pharmacy must have removes residue (make-up and dirt) and tones (preps) your skin for your serum or moisturizer. Its fatty acids and micelles help rebuild the skin's protective layer. For all skin types and even the most sensitive types.


2) Overdoing exfoliation (or not at al)
Exfoliation is an important step in skincare, because it removes all the dead skin cells on our skin and hides our soft baby skin underneath. However, all good things can be overdone. Your skin doesn’t need to be exfoliated every day, once or twice a week is more than enough. Scrubbing your face daily with grainy cleansers and exfoliating products can do more harm than good. Every time you exfoliate, you strip the top layers from your face by chemically (with an exfoliation acid) or physically (scrubs) breaking up your skin cells. It may cause redness, inflammation and irritation. And not giving your skin some time to chill during exfoliation routines, makes it more sensitive, more prone to sun damage and it will become discolored and inflamed. And we don’t want that, do we?

Remove those dead skin cells:
Ouai Scalp and Body Scrub: This deep-cleansing, foaming scrub is like a trip to rehab for your scalp and skin. It's a weekly detox powered by gently exfoliating sugar crystals to cleanse and soften skin and a dose of probiotics to leave your skin’s natural defenses on high alert.
Lixirskin Soft Clay Rubber: A rub-off formula that combines enzymatic and mechanical exfoliation to leave your skin impeccable cleared, purified and smooth. It is developed in the true tradition of French facials which include extraction (clearing clogged pores).
Lixirskin Night Switch PHA/AHA 10%: A blend of three acids for all skin types to exfoliate and remove dead and strongly pigmented cells and at the same time encourage cell turnaround to renew the skin. Each acid has its own perks: Lactic Acid improves the skin's natural moisture level, Lactobionic Acid is an exfoliator that reduces oxidative stress and Phytic Acid is a natural antioxidant that eliminates heavy metals which detoxify the skin.

3) Skipping the ingredient lecture
An instagrammable packaging is cute and all, but the most important thing that needs to catch your eye is the ingredients list. Maybe not that picture-perfect, but a very important thing to read while searching for skincare products. Brands can say pretty much every promising and greenwashing word they want, so it's up to us to know our ingredients. Every skin is different so educate yourself on what works for your skin! We recommend looking at the first 5 ingredients as these will have the highest concentration in the formula. For starters: You can find the most common ingredients to avoid in the blog “What is Clean Beauty? The what and how".

Let's get educated:
Get educated with our ingredient feature, which explains every single ingredient in the ingredient list, why it’s there and how it works. We encourage you to make well-informed beauty choices and we highly value transparency and education. All our products are tested, curated and selected by our Coucou Experts, a range of incredible on-the-ground ambassadors and beauty experts (such as dermatologists, doctors, skin experts and makeup artists). The amount of (sometimes biased) information about beauty can feel overwhelming and we want to go beyond the pretty packaging and help you understand why it works and what it does to your skin. So we shed some light on what’s actually inside these products.

So get coucou, but educated!