The One Thing I NEVER Do
As a skincare specialist, I get frequent questions from patients, friends, and strangers asking for advice about what they should do for their particular skin condition. While there are plenty of wonderful things we CAN do to make our skin healthy, there is one thing I suggest we NEVER do. Simply stopping this one behavior can definitely have a positive impact on how your skin looks and feels - PLUS it will shift your mindset for the better!
Have you ever thought any of the following: "My pores are HUGE!" "My zits look like volcanoes!" "My face is covered in peach fuzz!" If you have, chances are you were looking at your skin in a magnifying mirror. Friends, inspecting your face close-up has NO benefit - small disturbances become giant, it tempts you to pick at any blemishes, and often times we start to see ourselves as all of the flaws that show up under 10x magnification.
Everything looks huge through a magnifying mirror—your pores, the hair on your face, any small blemish that might be present—everything! Constantly looking at a close-up view of your face can give you a skewed view of your skin. Nothing looks normal under magnification! Think about it - NOBODY (and I mean nobody) looks at your skin from the point of view of almost ten times its normal size. So, why would you inspect it that closely?
You can drive yourself crazy by looking at yourself enlarged. What would it be like if we magnified our voices ten times the normal volume or magnified all our sense of smell by ten times? We would have a totally different perception of what our voices sounded like or what things smelled like. Don’t magnify your perfectly good skin ten times larger by looking at it through a magnifying mirror! Otherwise you are completely setting yourself up for failure, disappointment, and ultimately for taking steps to solve a problem you probably don’t even have.
So, what's the one thing I NEVER do? You guessed it - look at my skin through a magnifying mirror. Trust me, get rid of your magnifying mirror (of give it away to someone you don't like, lol). I always tell my patients they shouldn't use magnifying mirrors for anything other than applying makeup (if you can’t see very well), shaping your eyebrows*, or for some other positive reason.
If you do have problems with your skin, looking through a magnifying mirror certainly isn’t going to help clear it up. Looking at your lifestyle habits and making better choices will be a surer way to bring about long-term, permanent change.
*using a magnifying mirror to tweeze brows can be equally disastrous: at best you can end up with over-tweezed or uneven brows, at worst, you can end up plucking hairs that aren't ready to be tweezed thereby breaking the skin and causing scabs or even scars.
