Healthy Nerdism: Skincare Tuesday: Summer is coming and we are prepared!

(wearing my favourite Faceshop Smart Capsule CC cream, seriously best packaging ever)

This Skincare Tuesday is the first blog post in June, so I believe it's high time we talk about Summer and how to prepare your skin and keep it fresh and survive this season looking better than ever! There's a lot of things that change during the summer when it comes to the skin, therefore things such as skincare rotation, hydration levels and diet have to change accordingly.

With the extensive amount of sweating and heat in the summer, your skin starts becoming oilier and let's face it - there's nothing nastier than having your make-up running down your face.

Extensive dehydration also leads to extra dryness. My personal worst nightmare, as I have naturally dry skin. Most women, including myself, start cleansing more often in the summer. While in the winter you would be cleansing once a day before bed and just splash of water in the morning, during the summer you need to cleanse both in the morning and in the evening, to avoid that extra oiliness and dirt. This may add up to the dehydration. Natural answer is to use more moisturiser, but is this wise in the summer? Depending on the moisturiser this may add up to the oiliness throughout the day. The answer I've found works best for me is night treatments and masks!

Normally I would use a nice sheet face mask once a week, but in the summer I would make that 2-3 times a week, at least one of them needs to be extra moisturising. If you have naturally oily skin - exfoliate at least twice a week with a gentle scrub or a DIY sugar scrub. I highly recommend Skin Food Black Sugar Mask - it has a great effect and smells like heaven in a box. If you have naturally dry skin like me though avoid this. I rarely exfoliate and usually only on my nose area to remove blackheads.

Overnight treatments are something I recently found out trough the power of Korean cosmetics once again. It's more or less like a night cream, except you can still feel it on your face in the morning. You put a thick layer of it, like a mask and leave it overnight. I've got the THESAEM Snail Trio no.3 Lavender Sleeping Pack - not only is the packaging extremely adorable, but smells absolutely amazing (if you like lavender). I've heard lavender smell helps you sleep well too. Even if some gets on your pillow - it'll only make it smell nicer.
Don't forget to change pillow cases twice a week - I personally have a small cupboard where I'm just hoarding pillow cases. It really makes a difference.

Things get a bit trickier when you go to the beach and go in and out of the water loads of times a day - this dries your skin a lot, especially if the place where you're on a vacation uses hard water like in the UK. I've seen people's skin go to flakes and look like a dragon skin, be in pain and even bleed, because of hard water. It's something really hard to deal with if you have naturally dry skin. When my sister comes to visit me she needs to take special prescribed hand creams, as her hands can't take the change in water at all she her entire skin just starts shredding and bleeding, it's really horrible.

Never forget your sunscreen, this is your best friend. I personally avoid putting on any foundation at all when on vacation in the summer and just keep re-applying sunscreen and moisturiser when I feel my skin is drying. However, if you can't go out without your make-up, I recommend waterproof BB cream, such as The Face Shop Face It! BB cream, which seems to be out of stock everywhere... CC creams are quite light as well, I would say generally BB creams have more coverage than CC if that's what you're looking for and they're both great choices for the summer. I wouldn't recommend the Skin79 ones for hot countries though, as much as I love their BB creams, they tend to go a bit cakey if I sweat. I've been putting them to the test in the gym.