"Oh Stop!"...Buying 'anti-wrinkle' creams and products!

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What is your skin care routine to keep your skin young, healthy and vibrant? Does it include a gentle, exfoliating cleanser at least once per day? Then, good start! A serum to correct and improve? Yay! A moisturizer to lock in moisture and protect it from UV rays during the day? Awesome! But, are the products any good? In my practice I have seen $150. eye creams that contain only 50 cents worth of moisturizer when I read the ingredients.
Good products are not necessarily expensive. I carry an extremely therapeutic niacinamide (B3) serum (properly formulated B3 is the most therapeutic ingredient you can use) that is 1/3 the price of other good serums. And, I see products and ingredients in my new clients' regimens everyday that are either useless, or harmful!
How do you know what is worth it? Well, some advice...
Don't trust a brand. Know what ingredients have the ability to work with your skin.

• ​I carry 3 professional quality product lines-but not everything of theirs is actually good!
• Big companies pay a lot for advertising (you know the names), so they don't pay much for quality ingredients! The department store brands rarely contain therapeutic amounts of ingredients.
• ​Stop believing beauty magazines.. Product advertisers pay the magazine to mention them in articles.
• Don't go with the latest trend! Remember coconut oil? Wow, I needed to fix a lot of acneic and bumpy skin during that phase. But also don't rely on grandma's outdated advice! We now know Benzoyl Peroxide ages the skin; drying out acne makes it worse; and retinols irritate the skin, so are not advisable for most people.
  

​So, how do you know what to use?! You can spend a lot of time on the internet, and if you are using real, educated skin scientists' information...that is a good start (avoid sites that sell products). If it is useful for the skin, then you will read about the same few products on all of the expert's sites. If they tout even one “brand new, instant wrinkle remover, miracle ingredient”, run away from them! Not that there aren't occasionally new useful ingredients that emerge...but when they do, ALL of the true experts will start talking about them.
​If you want to correct a skin issue, then a dermatologist can prove useful. But in my experience (I have a lot of experience!), they might send you home with expensive prescriptions or products that are only temporarily effective (like benzoyl peroxide-a very skin aging ingredient). 
Find a knowledgeable, licensed esthetician-(not a cosmetologist that is 'allowed' to perform esthetics). A good esthetician (esty for short) will not sell you a lot of products all at once and will offer products that have some of the ingredients you read about that are most useful. The esty will evaluate your skin, find out if your current products are useful or harmful, and recommend a few changes to help you accomplish your skin care goals.