If you’ve achieved your 2021 skincare goals, congratulations! Maintaining good skin is hard work and requires consistent effort in order to see results. Today, we’re sharing key habits to stick to, tailored specially for combination skin. 

Do you have combination skin? Here’s how to tell.

First things first, understand what counts as combination skin. If you see oiliness in certain parts of your face (T-zone, we’re looking at you) and not others, and dryness too, it’s a sign that you have combination skin. 

For people with skin that’s a little bit of both, taking care of your skin is a little less straightforward than if you had either dry or oily skin. You might notice that skincare products are sometimes simultaneously a hit and miss, stimulating too much oiliness in some parts of your face but working perfect for your drier sections. 

How should we take care of combination skin?

When it comes to combination skin, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach. You might want to adopt a mix-and-match approach, adopting different products for different parts of your face - one set of products for oilier sections, one other set for drier sections. Here’s how we’d do it at The First Refresh.

Use a gentle cleanser that won’t dry out your skin, but still rids your skin of oil and impurities.

Stick to a gentle cleanser that won’t over-exfoliate your skin. Just because some areas might overproduce oil, be careful not to treat your combination skin to too-harsh skin products which may worsen your drier areas. Look for a pH-balanced cleanser to avoid irritating your skin. 

If you’re using two sets of products, use cleansing solutions with salicylic acid (BHA) for oily areas and glycolic acid (AHA) for drier areas as AHA boosts hydration. 

Use two moisturisers if you can!

Why? Because dry areas need moisturisers that help to lock in moisture, but these moisturisers are typically too heavy for oily skin. For oily skin sections, use an oil-free moisturiser that is emollient-based to avoid over-greasing. 

Multi-masking is your friend

More than just a skincare trend, multi-masking involves applying different masks on different sections of your face to treat different concerns. This targeted approach enables you to customize your masking so that you don’t counterintuitively exacerbate problem areas with the inappropriate treatment. To start off, identify the different skin concerns in different areas of your face - know which areas are dry, oily, or prone to clogging, and treat them accordingly with different masks. On dry areas, apply hydrating masks, on oily and clogged areas, clay masks are wonderful for drawing out impurities and absorbing oil.