Best Face Forward

For those of you who know me personally you know that I worry a lot about my face. Is it looking old? Am I mushing it too much? Should I be washing it more? And you know that I have very strong feelings about faces and what we should and shouldn't do to them. But really, I'm pretty lucky in the skin department and I find that as careful as I am, I sometimes abuse my face. Case in point: every morning I have to lick (that's right LICK) a cotton swab and wipe away the mascara schmearings that have left their traces overnight. So obviously I go to sleep with my makeup on. However. I don't want to push my good fortune and as I continuously age (every day by painful day) I want to make sure my face looks as fanastic as possible.

That said: I don't want to go crazy. I want easy, low-maintenance, skin care that won't turn me into a mirror obsessed woman. I like to go for periods of time where I abstain from makeup and when you're not wearing makeup your FACE has to look great all on its own; great meaning firm and dewy and delicious. The other day I looked at a picture of me wearing no make up and I looked ... not old ... but sort of tired, not my freshest and most appealing. I knew that the day would come when I would have to invest more time into maintaining my face, and that time is now.

I've heard super good stuff about the Olay line of anti-aging skin care so I went to their website and did an online skin care consultation. The consultation is just an in-depth questionnaire about what you expect from your products, what skin type you are, and how much work you're willing to do. Then you receive a nice laundry list of what products they recommend for you to use. Here's mine:

An anti-aging face wash that cleans "down to the pores"

A regenerating serum for pre-moisturizer application



Daily moisturizer for fighting the 7 signs of aging


I'm very excited to pick up these products and start using them. Apparently the serum is supposed to be SO awesome -- just read the reviews -- making your skin smooth and soft as baby bums. The Olay site also recommended an eye serum but that seemed like too much and I'll probably only use the regenerating serum in the mornings after I babywipe my face because I only wash my face in the shower because my skin is so flippin' dry I can overwash it, regardless of how gentle the soap is. I know that this goes against every piece of skincare advice out there, but one also has to listen to one's face. My face says, "if you wash me every day, I will crack." And I want to love the skin I'm in, not torture it. Well, not yet anyway.