An Esthetician Shares Why You Should Update Your Skin-Care Routine in the New Year (Plus the Four-Step Plan for Doing It)

Meet Wellness Collective, our immersive curriculum with Athleta that hooks you up with actionable advice from the smartest experts and brand founders in wellness right now. Get the goods at our monthly event series in New York City, plus our online one-month wellness plans. Here, Heyday skin therapist Shardae Boyce shares her four-week plan for updating your skin-care routine.

As you're examining everything from your career to how you want to approach nutrition in 2020, there's another aspect of your life that wants in on your new year's goal setting: your skin-care routine.

Shardae Boyce, licensed esthetician and skin therapist at Heyday (and known as the "glow giver" to her regular clients—um, yes please) is an advocate for reassessing your beauty regimen every season because yes, your skin's needs do change.

"Your skin will typically start to change when your first start your skin-care journey, so you will notice that you may not necessarily need certain products that you needed when you first started," Boyce says. "I typically inform certain skin types to change their cleansers and moisturizer during different seasons: cream cleansers and heavier moisturizer in the fall and winter, gel cleansers and water-based moisturizer in the spring and summer. You’d be amazed at the difference it really makes."

To help you with your seasonal skin-care assessment, Boyce is sharing her intel on the reasons you might want to update your routine for the new year, broken down into a four-step plan for putting it into action.

Scroll down for her four-week plan for updating your skin-care routine for the new year.

Reason number one you might want to switch up your skin-care situation: if your skin doesn't look quite the way you'd like or feels uncomfortable, Boyce says.

If that's the case for you, it might mean you haven't properly identified your skin type. "The right skin-care routine starts with your skin type (which is genetic and does not change), but also addresses your skin conditions, like dehydration or blackheads that can change over time depending on your health, lifestyle, or even the climate you're living in."

Boyce recommends getting a skin analysis from a professional (at Heyday they're free with any treatment) to determine your skin type, but you can also do so at home by determining whether your skin is dry (if it feels tight or is flaky), combination (if you notice dryness mostly on your cheeks), or oily (if your face is noticeably shiny).

Once you've determined your skin's type and conditions, you can start setting goals—whether that's clearing breakouts, brightening dull skin, hydrating dry patches, etc. Just remember to be patient and not obsess over your complexion correction mission.

"Your skin is your own," Boyce says. "It’s unique and it deserves to be cared for. At the same time, you should never feel like a prisoner to your regimen. If skin care is considered part of self care or wellness then it should fundamentally be part of making you feel good, for lack of a better term, in your own skin."

Like flossing and stretching, wearing sunscreen every day is one of those things we know we should do, but could probably do a little more often. Think about how often you wear SPF (it should be daily, even if it's cloudy outside) and how you can work it into your regimen most seamlessly—whether that's through a dedicated daily sunscreen, or a moisturizer or foundation with SPF added.

"SPF is the number-one product to help prevent premature aging," Boyce says, so if protecting your skin from fine lines and dark spots is on your list of goals, SPF should be in your medicine cabinet.

The last reason you might want to update your skin-care routine is if you just want to switch things up. If you're interested in new and emerging ingredients (bakuchiol, anyone?) you should definitely look into adding them to your regimen, Boyce says.

"My philosophy when it comes to skin care is that everyone deserves beautiful, healthy, glowing skin," says Boyce. Permission to experiment away.

Sponsored by Athleta

Want more Wellness Collective? Click here for more wellness intel.