One day you’re cruising along in your 20s, having perfect, plump, hydrated skin, and the next – you’ve hit your 30s, and what seems like overnight your skin has completely changed. Sound familiar? Some of us begin to see the effects of sun damage, others start experiencing dryness, uneven skin tone, or the appearance of fine lines and wrinkles.
It’s a wake-up call for sure. Your skin needs change in your 30s, there’s no doubt about it. Your skincare routine will need to change from one of prevention (you were using sunscreen, weren’t you?) to one of damage control.
In your 30s your hormones are fluctuating (especially if you’re pregnant or postpartum) and a drop in estrogen means your skin will look a little less glowy than it did just a few years ago. Sun damage starts to set in, environmental factors begin to wreak havoc and even your diet starts to play a much bigger role in the health and appearance of your skin. So it’s no wonder you’ve started looking for the perfect anti-aging routine for your 30s!
Skin In Your 30s
There are a couple of major physical changes that happen within your skin in your 30s. For starters, your skin starts to produce less hyaluronic acid, less collagen, and less elastin. Three things that your skin needs in order to look full, healthy, and firm. The skin begins to lose elasticity and doesn’t hold onto moisture as well as it used to mean fine lines and wrinkles start to appear, and since the skin isn’t producing the proteins it needs to naturally “fill” itself back in.
Secondly, the skin’s natural cycle of regeneration begins to slow down. By the time we reach our 30s skin cell turnover can take up to 48 days to complete a cycle (compared to about 14 days when we’re newborns!) And it only gets worse from here, as skin cell turnover can take almost double that time when we reach our 50s. This affects the look and feels of the skin as it can take on a rough, dry, and overall less radiant appearance.
Finally, you might start to see the effects of all those long beach days where you might have forgotten to reapply (or ever apply) your sunscreen. UV damage begins to catch up with us in our 30s in the form of dark spots, uneven skin tone, and more fine lines.
The Perfect Anti-Aging Skincare Routine for Your 30s
Don’t let all that get you down, though, because in your 30s you’ve still got plenty of time to implement the proper anti-aging routine to both correct damages as well as take preventive measures. The best skin care routine will take all of those skin conditions we talked about above into account. You are going to want to incorporate a hydrating product like hyaluronic acid, something to increase skin cell turnover like nightly retinol, a serum with niacinamide if you need to deal with hyperpigmentation issues, a gentle chemical exfoliator to slough off dead skin cells and reveal healthy skin below, and, of course, an anti-aging serum with growth factors to increase collagen and elastin production and improve the appearance of wrinkles.
The Routine:
- A Gentle Cleanser Both Morning and Night
- A Hydrating Toner
- A Daily Antioxidant Serum
- A Creamy, Hydrating Moisturizer
- A Daily Broad Spectrum Sunscreen
- A Weekly Chemical Exfoliation Treatment
The Details:
A Gentle Cleanser Both Morning and Night
You’re not in your teens or 20s anymore so you can leave that harsh cleanser behind. A gentle gel or milk-based cleanser in the morning will help prime your skin to absorb all the hydrating and collagen-jumpstarting goodness that you’ll apply in your skincare routine. And you already know, the most important wash is the one before bed, making sure to remove all makeup and any dirt that has accumulated over the course of the day.
A Hydrating Toner
In your 30s you would ideally look for a toner that is both moisturizing and can balance the pH of your skin. A quick-absorbing formula like the Dr. Dream® Advanced Facial Treatment Toner creates a healthy, hydrated base on which to apply your serum. But this toner isn’t just a primer for other products, it has its own dose of active ingredients like growth factors to actually promote skin renewal and cellular turnover which helps to support the efficacy of your other anti-aging products.
A Daily Antioxidant Serum
You’ve probably already begun incorporating a serum into your skincare routine, but if not, it’s high time you do so. A serum is an important step in any Korean Skincare regimen but especially now that you are in your 30s. You’ll want to choose a serum, that targets your specific skin conditions – whether it’s dry skin, dark spots or hyperpigmentation, fine lines, and wrinkles, or even adult acne issues. If you have a combination of aging-related skin conditions, a serum with growth factors is a must. The Dr.Dream Advanced Facial Treatment Serum is formulated to care for a variety of issues with a patented high-concentration combination of multi-growth factors (EGF, aFGF, bFGF, IGF-1, KGF, VEGF) to smooth and soften skin while improving elasticity, skin tone, and collagen production.
A Creamy, Hydrating Moisturizer
If you’re dealing with dry skin in your 30s, a one-two punch of back-to-back serum and moisturizer is going to be a life-saver. Moisturizer helps to seal in your serum, create a layer on the skin to protect from free radicals and other environmental damage, and of course, provides a dose of hydration to make sure skin is looking plump and firm. For this, we recommend the dr. dream® Cold Plazma Whitening Cream that works in unison with our other dr. dream products to bring out skin’s natural radiance from within.
A Daily Broad Spectrum Sunscreen
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: you must get serious about sunscreen application. Some 80% of skin aging can be attributed to the sun’s rays, and it isn’t just when we’re outside. We are exposed to UVA rays on cloudy days, indoors and in the car through windows. It’s time to make sunscreen a part of your skincare routine. Remember: sunblock is always the last step! It’s the last product you apply before putting on makeup.
A Weekly Chemical Exfoliation Treatment
Finally, once or twice a week (depending on how sensitive your skin is and how potent the product is that you use), you will want to use a product that provides a chemical exfoliation to remove dead skin cells from the top layer of skin. In your 30s you will probably want to skip the manual exfoliators that can sometimes be a bit too rough for aging skin and opt for an AHA instead. Either way, sloughing off the buildup and dead skin cells is the final key to unlock and reveal the fresh skin underneath.
So there you have it, welcome to your 30s! Wrinkles may be more or less inevitable with age, but we can do our best to care for and pamper our skin with a proper anti-aging skincare routine to keep it looking healthy and radiant. Remember the biggest points to remember for your 30s are hydration, UV protection, gentle exfoliation, and a multi-use product to encourage collagen production, protect against free radical damage and maintain an overall healthy skin structure and function.
