Nine Months Without Actives
When you’re pregnant take everything you know about skincare and throw it out the window… sort of. For nine whole months your skincare routine isn’t about adding, or treating, or managing. It’s about subtracting while holding the line all while your hormones surge and change. (It’s even longer if you go the breastfeeding route.)
As if overnight, everything that once made my skin “good” are off the table, and you’re left staring at your shelf like… okay, now what? For some I think the transition is huge, while for others there’s barely a change if any at all so I’ll tell you what my experience was and what I did to maintain ‘good’ skin during those 9 months.
Before I go through my routine, what worked and what sort of did nothing, I want to say that I didn’t go about making sure that every product I used was labelled as pregnancy safe. Instead I just avoided known unsafe ingredients including (retinol and retinoids, salicylic acid and all BHAs, lactic acid, glycolic acid, and chemical sunscreen.) Some people also avoid certain root ingredients like licorice or mushroom extracts and most essential oils - I didn’t but do what you think is best always.
Mornings:
I kept up with my usual favorite morning cleansers: Fresh Soy Face Cleanser or Peach and Lilly Cleanser. Followed by my water essence (it’s so important to keep skin well hydrated during pregnancy to maintain elasticity and clarity.) I love the Peach and Lilly Wild Dew Treatment as well. For morning serums I kept leaned on antioxidants as my powerhouse either with the Caudalie Resveratrol Lift Serum or the Aesop Vitamin C. I still used redlight LED whenever I felt the energy for it, eye patches if I had them on hand and a good moisturizing cream.
Daytime:
During the daytime, since I live in South Florida, I always was dilligent about applying a thick layer of a physical sunscreen. I really felt like my skin was getting freckles / was much more sensitive to the sun during pregnancy for some reason.
I also found myself wearing less makeup overall than I had previously but I didn’t cut out or remove any specific makeup products - I think I just didn’t feel like wearing it.
Evenings:
At night one of the biggest changes was that I would do my night time skincare at 6pm or so… not for any skin reason other than that I found myself so drained in the evenings I wanted to make sure it was done early so I would be able to just crash into bed whenever the feeling came to me.
The routine consisted of an oil cleanser, usually the Elemis Pro Cleansing Balm followed by a traditional cleanse with either the Elemis Pro Collagen Cleansing Mousse or the Youth to the People Superfood Cleanser. I would use the same essence at night as I did in the morning and would use either a peptide serum like the Innbeauty Project Peptide Serum or collagen serum like the Elemis Pro Collagen Serum. Then I would go in with a thick moisturizer. I’m not listing them out by name because I rotated through so many and also I think there’s very little true difference between them at the end of the day. I will say, I leaned into thicker creams than I ever used before. The kind I used to avoid because they felt too rich or unnecessary. Suddenly they were the only thing that made my skin feel stable and cared particularly at night.
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With fewer steps morning and evening I would take my time with each step, massaging products in with intention and just savoring the moment. The whole routine slowed down and felt much calmer overall.
Of course, there were moments where I missed the immediacy of stronger actives. When a breakout would show up and I knew exactly what I would have used before and now couldn’t. That was the hardest part. During pregnancy everything (not just skincare) became about patience and trust.
Rather than viewing my skin as something to fix in real time. Pregnancy forced a kind of long-view perspective onto I also began to notice in time how your my skin would react not just to products, but to sleep, to food, to stress in a way that I hadn’t tuned into before.
I think overall having to step back forced me to accept change, and time, and myself - as I was as I am, which honestly, might be the best thing pregnancy did for my skin.