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[music] Hello, I’m Dr. Neal Schultz
[pause]
and welcome to DermTV.
Today’s topic was submitted by our friends at the BeautyBean.com which is a
wellness and lifestyle blog. Their question is simply, “Can you use regular
facial skin care products in the eye area?” And the answer is, many of them
you can but some of them you shouldn’t and I'll explain why. The skin of
the eye area is very different from most of the skin of the rest of the
face. It’s thinner, it’s more sensitive, and it has fewer oil glands and
fewer water glands. As a result of that, first of all, it needs more
moisturization so while you can use your facial moisturizer there, it may
not be rich enough. You may want to use one that has more water or is more
emollient and also you may want to use one that has a little bit of oil to
give it the richness that that thinner, fragile skin requires. When it
comes to exfoliants, you need to use less strong exfoliants. I very
strongly believe that everybody every day should use three essential skin
care ingredients. And the first one is an exfoliant. The other two are
sunscreens and topical antioxidants but being such a strong proponent of
using exfoliants, make sure that the exfoliant you use in the eye area is
of a lower strength, and also most of them have been pH adjusted which
means they’re not as harsh or they’re not as acidic because they’re being
used in that sensitive eye skin area. Third, toners. If you’re going to use
a toner or an stringent in the eye area, make sure that it doesn’t contain
any alcohol. And, when it comes to cleansers, while you can use your
regular facial cleanser in this area, people usually are afraid of getting
some of the soap in their eye and just having discomfort so most people,
for cleansing their eyelid area or for removing makeup, use eye makeup
remover which is applied more conveniently on pads so there’s less of an
opportunity to actually have it go in your eye. Lastly, you all have very
good common sense when it comes to this stuff. If your gut feeling tells
you you shouldn’t use it in the eye area then don’t. Otherwise, most of the
products can safely be used in the eye area.