Beauty brains/the manual

Softly-softly skincare

Gentle facial treatments and hair boosters

We’ve previously discussed the lockdown-proof hairdo. That’s a good strategy. The rise in lockdown-proof lasers and peels – stronger than usual doses because who knows if a local lockdown could boot your next appointment into 2021 – is not so great.

Do we even want to be taking off layers of skin in the first place? Acids, peels and dermaplaning are all certainly effective when it comes to removing the top layers, which wof skin gurus who believe this isn’t the best approach to the skin’s long-term health. Dermaplaners, for instance, which use a fine blade to remove downy hair on your face – and ‘a build up of dead skin’ into the bargain – have been one of the most popular at-home beauty devices during lockdown.

Doesn’t this all sound a bit extreme? If you want to go in for an at-home gadget, invest in one of the new breed of electrical facial toners from Facegym, Foreo or Beglow. Give any one of them a few weeks and they really make a difference. Plus, they encourage use of nourishing oils.

But your first considerations should be nutrition, sleep and movement (plus sparing use of retinol or topical vitamin C). ‘The problem with so many of today’s instant results is they’re predicated on creating stress to the skin cells in order to trigger their repair mechanism,’ says Lucy Goff, founder of Lyma supplements. ‘Thinning the skin really isn’t best practice. Increasingly modern beauty approaches will be much more focused on strengthening muscles and boosting repair without creating any initial damage.’