The idea of getting your beauty sleep isn’t just a figure of speech. While you’re asleep, your skin is hard at work repairing the damage of the day and renewing itself. Using the same products on your skin day and night is therefore a missed opportunity. A science-backed, high-performance nighttime skincare routine is your chance to support your skin’s restorative process and address skincare concerns without interference from environmental stressors like pollution and UV rays.
This step-by-step nighttime skincare routine will help you bolster your skin’s efforts to renew and repair itself while delivering deep hydration and locking in crucial moisture so you wake up refreshed, renewed and glowing.Nighttime Skincare Routine Steps
1. Cleanse + Remove Makeup/SPF
Cleansing and removing makeup are not one in the same. Whether you wear makeup or prefer using just SPF, a double cleanse starting with an oil-based cleanser is the best way to clean your face. Think of it like sweeping before you mop: if you skip the first step, you’ll end up pushing dirt and impurities all over your face while you wash, inevitably leaving a thin film behind after rinsing.
Start by applying an oil-based cleanser such as our Antioxidant Cleansing Oil to a dry face. This light and silky cleansing oil effortlessly dissolves impurities and makeup while adding a burst of squalane-fueled hydration. Meanwhile, nourishing antioxidants target stress and signs of aging, leaving the skin healthy, radiant, and nourished.
Rinse with water and watch as the product transforms into a silky, luxurious milky cleanser. Then follow with our Amino Aloe Gentle Cleanser. Formulated for all skin types, this satisfying foaming cleanser uses a powerful amino acid complex to break down dirt while aloe calms and soothes and moringa extract removes remnants of pore-clogging environmental debris. Your skin is left clean, hydrated, and refreshed.
2. Balance
You may think of toner as the acne-fighting astringents of your teen years. But toning is actually an often-overlooked skincare step that balances the skin’s pH and prepares it to receive moisture and active skincare ingredients. This is especially important during a nighttime skincare routine that includes proven-effective ingredients aimed at addressing your skincare concerns.Our alcohol-free BHA Pore-Minimizing Toner uses white willowbark extract - a natural, oil-soluble beta hydroxy acid - to gently but powerfully exfoliate and decongest pores. Meanwhile, caviar lime extract works its alpha hydroxy magic to gently exfoliate dead cells from the surface of your skin. All this happens without any drying or over-stripping thanks to our sugarcane-derived squalane, which balances the skin and leaves it smooth and hydrated.
3. Protect
The skin around your eye area is thinner than elsewhere on your face, making it more delicate and sensitive. We recommend applying a nourishing eye cream prior to your treatment step to help protect the area from irritation.Our multi-award-winning Marine Algae Eye Cream helps lift and firm, making tired eyes look brighter and more awake. Pink marine algae, a natural source of peptides, plumps fine lines and wrinkles while our superhero hydrator, squalane, provides deep and lasting protective moisture.
4. Treat
Supercharge your skin’s renewal process during the treatment step of your nighttime skincare routine by incorporating serum ingredients that increase cell turnover, such as lactic acid and retinoids.
While we recommend against layering these powerful exfoliants, you can alternate using our Lactic Acid Resurfacing Serum and our Retinol Night Serum or try skin cycling to get the benefits of both.
We recommend starting with our Lactic Acid Resurfacing Serum to powerfully exfoliate and reduce the appearance of enlarged pores. Our 10% vegan lactic acid formula helps banish dullness by exfoliating to reveal smoother, more even-textured, hydrated skin while clover boosts lactic acid’s exfoliating benefits by revving up cell turnover. The next evening, massage a pea-sized amount of our Retinol Night Serum into cleansed and balanced skin. Our groundbreaking formula reduces irritation by time-releasing our powerful retinoid actives into your skin over the course of 8 hours. The result: all the skin-smoothing, dark-spot-improving benefits of retinoids with a boost of squalane-powered hydration, not irritation.5. Moisturize
At night, the body supports its overnight repair process by boosting blood flow to the skin. This increases the permeability of the skin’s protective moisture barrier, causing your skin to lose moisture and water overnight. This is why most people benefit from using a richer, more nourishing face cream during their PM routine. Our most intensive renewal cream — Ectoin Overnight Rescue — is brimming with specific nighttime benefits that turbocharge barrier repair while you sleep. Our powerfully restorative formula includes ectoin, a clinically proven bio-fermented molecule known to fight environmental stressors while binding and sealing moisture into the skin. Paired with squalane, it leaves skin feeling stronger and more supple after just one overnight treatment. Meanwhile sleep-promoting magnesium and peptides help calm stress-inducing neurotransmitters optimize skin’s capacity for repair.
You’ll awaken to smooth, supple, plump, and deeply hydrated skin with renewed self-defense capabilities to help maintain these results throughout the day.6. Lock in Moisture
Topping your moisturizer with a non-comedogenic facial oil locks in moisture to further prevent the skin from becoming dehydrated overnight. Our 100% Squalane Oil goes one step further by driving skincare actives 40x deeper into the epidermis, making your skincare work harder as it weightlessly locks in moisture and delivers deep hydration. Our sugarcane-derived squalane is a molecular match for the moisture naturally found in human skin. It’s also pregnancy-safe and fragrance-free, making it safe for every skin type.
