Why Asians have perfect skin? This is what I found during my time living in Asia

Sachrizada

Hey gals, apologies in advance for my rant about cosmetics and beauty products but maybe it will be relevant to some of you.
Long story short I have been suffering from bad skin since I was a teenager. At this point (im 30) I spend tens of thousands on various products and procedures and saw little result (that's 15 years of money spending. It accumulates into some insane amounts). It's like all these super fancy cleaners, creams, toners, scrubs work short term but then it kinda doesn't work. Anyway you know what I mean.
Then one day I traveled to Asia for a few months (Korea and Japan) and checked out what the ladies use in there. And it looked pretty much similar to what we have. So I asked myself why none of them have skin problems. You know, things didn't add up, right? And after a bit of digging this is what I found: Korean and Japanese products are least contamined in the world. This is no joke guys. They have different kind of regulation, while Chinese are most contamined in the world. Then European and US are very close to Chinese too. I kid you not!!! This was a mind**** for me and I started buying their products. And guess what? No, really... My skin problems disappeared and I have no more breakouts. It's like all these years I been using some poisonous stuff on my skin and expecting it to work. Anyway I no longer wear makeup because I don't need to hide my gross skin because it's not gross anymore.
So that's that. I know how how it feels to have bad skin. You can feel helpless and etc that's why I am sharing this with you here! I wish I at my time read a post like this and tried it out. Anyway if you are interested in hearing more about this, what works, what to use, write me I guess (sorry this is my first post and I don't know how boards work. Do you write me or reply to this post?) anyway, good luck and hope this was educational.

idunno78

There has been a few posts in the last few weeks here about Korean beauty! So I'm sure lots of people would be interested in what different things you use!
So do you go they all the crazy steps they have or just the normal cleanse tone moisture?

idunno78

There has been a few posts in the last few weeks here about Korean beauty! So I'm sure lots of people would be interested in what different things you use!
So do you go they all the crazy steps they have or just the normal cleanse tone moisture?

BetsyEllen

First post on boards, offering advice, PM for more info...let me guess, there's one particular product you recommend right?

Sachrizada

BetsyEllen wrote: »

First post on boards, offering advice, PM for more info...let me guess, there's one particular product you recommend right?

Lol you wish

2Mad2BeMad

Really? I find most Asian teenagers to have acne. Like alot of teenagers.

Sachrizada

idunno78 wrote: »

There has been a few posts in the last few weeks here about Korean beauty! So I'm sure lots of people would be interested in what different things you use!
So do you go they all the crazy steps they have or just the normal cleanse tone moisture?

The main thing is they use creams and masks that are not European, Chinese and American. Literally all the things they use are made in Korea or Japan. It works for them because they put materials from Jeju island and food stuff in cosmetics. The regulations, how they make, everything is different. There is less tolerance to allergens so they simply don't put any questionable ingredients. They have hundreds of brands and etc so it really doesn't matter what to use. I get my info online by searching what is the most sold thing etc but it keeps changing every few months.
The daily routine I observed was like this:
A face mask,
some face cream,
some hand cream,
(Makeup was totally optional and very different from ours. It looked like a pressed powder box but it was all squishy inside)
Everything had spf 30-50 or even more.
Also some of the products had hilarious names. I don't want to write the name now since ladies will think I'm selling something lol
Is that helpful at least a bit?

Sachrizada

2Mad2BeMad wrote: »

Really? I find most Asian teenagers to have acne. Like alot of teenagers.

Chinese do. Koreans and Japanese don't. Well unless they come here and get exposed to our super awesome stuff

Sachrizada

Also a little bit more on the price of things. Great masks are 1 Euro each. (Don't trust internet when they recommend you 40 Euro masks)
Same goes for creams, shampoo etc.
It's much cheaper then our makeup.

Ultimate Seduction

I could be a whaky conspiracy theorist but I think western beauty products actually make your skin bad, therefore you buy lots more product to try make it better again.

I find home remedy threatments the best for nearly everything for skin, hair, toenails act. Rubbing chemicals in your skin just doesn't make sense to me.
It's like eating sweets to lose weight. Your better off eating fruit and veg

SmallTeapot

Erm, I might be wrong, so open to correction here, but pretty sure their regimented use of SPF everyday could have some impact on skin quality also.............


I do think some of the Asian skincare products look cool though. Would love to try some at some stage

Sachrizada

Ultimate Seduction wrote: »

I could be a whaky conspiracy theorist but I think western beauty products actually make your skin bad, therefore you buy lots more product to try make it better again.

I find home remedy threatments the best for nearly everything for skin, hair, toenails act. Rubbing chemicals in your skin just doesn't make sense to me.
It's like eating sweets to lose weight. Your better off eating fruit and veg

Ok that is literally what I though too! I didn't have any proof though, since it perfectly acceptable in here to have bazillion skin diseases like I used to.
So before my trip, for years I'd be making my own soap, shampoo and everything.
I remember my husband complained to his mom about me doing so and she came over to educate me about how to buy shampoo from boots. But i just didn't give in to this since it western product is designed to make you buy more product.

It became very clear what crap are we exposed to day after day when living outside of our western world.

If your skin is not tolerant to contamination I bet you can feel that something is very off here.

I wouldn't go back to making my own stuff now btw since the one I use now works well for me. (And it doesn't irritate my husbands mom anymore too )

Just saying this cosmetics industry is messed up

Sachrizada

SmallTeapot wrote: »

Erm, I might be wrong, so open to correction here, but pretty sure their regimented use of SPF everyday could have some impact on skin quality also.............


I do think some of the Asian skincare products look cool though. Would love to try some at some stage

SPF seems to be in everything. Even my lipstick is SPF 30.

But also they don't do this thing where they say - oh let's sell aloe Vera cream, and first ingredient is some Phenoxyethanol etc. Main ingredient is what they usually are trying to sell.

And the products are indeed fun.

Sachrizada

And since I'm in sharing mood today I'll try to depict one more experience I had with this.
So acne and backne was no joke for me. I visited my gp and he send me to gynaecologist hence its all a women hormone issue (I was 28 then).
I was prescribed hormones that would heal my skin and it did. And I gained weight. When I approached gp and gynaecologist about this they said it's normal and suggested me to buy some weight loss pills.
I said - **** it. And I did nothing for a while. It took over a year for me weight to stabilise and I had to work hard to loose it. Needless to say skin condition was back. Inflamed etc I looked worse then before, not only bad skin but fat too.
It's so easy to fall for this, trust people that in the end work together to put some of us in this crazy loop.

While I don't think there are many ladies like me out there, who went though similar issues, to the ones that did - i really wish you strength and persistence.
While the insight I shared may not be relevant or useful to you I want to say - keep exploring, be bold because that one time you might succeed. And that's all you need - to succeed once

And cheers for being friendly on my first thread 🌸 ðŸ’⛩ðŸ˜

Probably coincidence. You were probably at the age that adult acne sometimes clears up on it's own. Either way, a sample size of one isn't exactly conclusive.

That said, reading here sometimes about people using up to 30 products on their faces in the course of a day, between cleansers and treatments and various makeup products - and I'm guilty of much of it myself - cannot be good for anyones skin as most of it sits on the surface, preventing the skin from functioning optimally. It is an organ. The skin has functions other than to look good, it's has sensory, immunological and metabolic functions that layering products on can affect.

Skin is a impermeable surface, the only hydrophillic layer is the very top one where capillary action allows water to evaporate or be absorbed, so it repels what people apply to it except some water at the very surface. Most products do not 'sink in', they contain ingredients that make them evaporate on contact with air and it gives the impression they've sunk in. Oil based moisturisers work by preventing water evaporating from the surface drawn from the deeper layers, not by adding anything other than lipids that make the dead uppermost layer feel softer, but no less dead.

Anything that can penetrate beyond the superficial - all but dead - top layers of the epidermis would be considered a drug therapy and would need a prescription to buy. The permeability is because corneocytes are filled with hard keratins held together with lipids and this creates a barrier that almost nothing can get past, no matter what the cosmetics companies say when they very carefully make claims that aren't really claims at all but bare-faced lies.

Less ingredients in products is probably a good thing, but instead of buying more products it's probably just as good an idea to use fewer, and less of them. It's likely to make the ones you do use more effective as there's less congestion on the skins surface.

Less is probably more, folks.

sareer

I lived in India for a long while and noticed that either they were blessed with perfect skin or suffer from terrible acne as teenagers but most commonly they do have great skin. 
I would say they eat less sugar and processed food - being used to eat home cooked food three times a day with nothing out of cans, rarely frozen food items and even those are mostly veggies they froze themselves, and nothing ready-made beyond their obsession with a local type of ramen noodles. 
Of course, that's changing nowadays with more and more middle class people taking up smoking (comparatively rare to Europeans the same age), drinking alcohol (stigmatized, especially for women) and eating junk/processed food. 
I can also tell that my skin is better the more I cook from scratch and the more water I drink in a day. I am early 30s and my skin sometimes still makes me look like a teenager so genetics are definitely key too.

sareer

(Before I get told off by any Indians on boards, I should say that Indians don't consider themselves to be "Asians" but "South Asians" but that's besides the point here in my opinion )

As for products, they don't use a lot of stuff from what I have seen so almost no make up and if they do they don't usually buy quality stuff so often it's very cheap nail polish and kajal, some simple dove soap for their face and a random l'oreal shampoo along with a whitening day cream full of chemicals, nothing fancy.

Sugar damages collagen in the skin, a high sugar diet is likely to result in premature gravitational sag.

Sachrizada

Candie wrote: »

Probably coincidence. You were probably at the age that adult acne sometimes clears up on it's own. Either way, a sample size of one isn't exactly conclusive.

That said, reading here sometimes about people using up to 30 products on their faces in the course of a day, between cleansers and treatments and various makeup products - and I'm guilty of much of it myself - cannot be good for anyones skin as most of it sits on the surface, preventing the skin from functioning optimally. It is an organ. The skin has functions other than to look good, it's has sensory, immunological and metabolic functions that layering products on can affect.

Skin is a impermeable surface, the only hydrophillic layer is the very top one where capillary action allows water to evaporate or be absorbed, so it repels what people apply to it except some water at the very surface. Most products do not 'sink in', they contain ingredients that make them evaporate on contact with air and it gives the impression they've sunk in. Oil based moisturisers work by preventing water evaporating from the surface drawn from the deeper layers, not by adding anything other than lipids that make the dead uppermost layer feel softer, but no less dead.

Anything that can penetrate beyond the superficial - all but dead - top layers of the epidermis would be considered a drug therapy and would need a prescription to buy. The permeability is because corneocytes are filled with hard keratins held together with lipids and this creates a barrier that almost nothing can get past, no matter what the cosmetics companies say when they very carefully make claims that aren't really claims at all but bare-faced lies.

Less ingredients in products is probably a good thing, but instead of buying more products it's probably just as good an idea to use fewer, and less of them. It's likely to make the ones you do use more effective as there's less congestion on the skins surface.

Less is probably more, folks.

This makes sense to me.

I dropped all the medicine and all chemical shampoos we have here, everything. I stated making my own but it didn't get any better.

In the next 2 years the skin was just plain bad. My home made stuff wasn't helping but it wasn't making it worse too. Eventually very unvillingly I dropped my home made cosmetics too (I used to buy shea butter and glycol in bulk and make soap and used no poo method instead of shampoo).

Today I use only literally one thing now - plain aloe Vera from Korea. Could it be that reducing it all to one product made the difference? I noticed that the base is very watery.

I did an experiment for a few months too and used body lotion from boots and I started having backe on my back. Then I switched back and it worked again?
Did this happen because I was using 2 products? I am trying to correlate my success here with the county of oringin but could it be the amount of things that should be used instead?

Sachrizada

sareer wrote: »

(Before I get told off by any Indians on boards, I should say that Indians don't consider themselves to be "Asians" but "South Asians" but that's besides the point here in my opinion )

As for products, they don't use a lot of stuff from what I have seen so almost no make up and if they do they don't usually buy quality stuff so often it's very cheap nail polish and kajal, some simple dove soap for their face and a random l'oreal shampoo along with a whitening day cream full of chemicals, nothing fancy.

This sounds really cool.
I bought the kajal for fun but I'm loving it.
The whitening stuff still seems scary for me. It's really popular across all Asia and they go in the streets just with that cream on.
Does the same thing happen in India?
Also I heard that Indians like vegetarian food a lot (which is naturally healthy)
Korean and Japanese ladies on the other hand eat and drink as much as men do. But to be fair I think their relationship with sugar is different from ours. I think they have a healthier aproach to it.

From Indian products what did you try/like? Is there anything people in india would recommend?

Sachrizada

That makes sense to me.

While both in Korea and Japan they had so much sweets to choose from ladies picked the green macha sweets that are actually very bitter in taste. They also likes red beans and tomatos as a desert instead of chocholate.

The sweetest thing I ate had either honey base or cream base but the sweet portion sizes are enourmous.

They seem to totally avoid cacao milk chocholate now that I think about it.

Sachrizada

Sachrizada wrote: »

This makes sense to me.

I dropped all the medicine and all chemical shampoos we have here, everything. I stated making my own but it didn't get any better.

In the next 2 years the skin was just plain bad. My home made stuff wasn't helping but it wasn't making it worse too. Eventually very unvillingly I dropped my home made cosmetics too (I used to buy shea butter and glycol in bulk and make soap and used no poo method instead of shampoo).

Today I use only literally one thing now - plain aloe Vera from Korea. Could it be that reducing it all to one product made the difference? I noticed that the base is very watery.

I did an experiment for a few months too and used body lotion from boots and I started having backe on my back. Then I switched back and it worked again?
Did this happen because I was using 2 products? I am trying to correlate my success here with the county of oringin but could it be the amount of things that should be used instead?

I'd imagine less interaction between things that work - emollients and some substances like hylauronic acid - with much the same products in different formulations and all of them with their own chemical content, would mean what you do use is likely to be less congestive, irritant, or upset the acid mantle and normal functioning of the skin and be more effective.

There's certainly almost no evidence that most products work as advertised, but the perception is that they do benefit, and when investigated this boils down to how the consumer values the product, it's smell and texture, and how much the consumer paid for it. People believe more expensive things work better, even though no evidence supports this. Products that are 'proven' to work, almost always show an improvement of skin quality of less than 1%, and this is likely to be because of increased diligence in taking care of the skin in an expectation that the product is doing them a big favour. So they do work, but to a minuscule degree that's probably because of other factors.

A lot of those studies where average improvements are of much greater percentages use a high proportion of women who have never used moisturizers before, so of course they will see much greater average results when the top layer of skin is hydrated vs never having used a moisturizer regularly before.

Cosmetics companies do their own studies with results like 8 out of 12 women agreed their skin felt better - which tells us they were asked leading questions and relied on self assessment. Unscientific and meaningless results.

sareer

Indians are often vegetarian (by census 40% of the population, that is) and they very strongly believe in the concept of food being either cold or hot. For example, nuts are generally hot so if you eat them in summer your pimples will for sure come up. Same for most meat types. Here an overview - https://www.banyanbotanicals.com/info/ayurvedic-living/living-ayurveda/diet/cooling-vs.-heating-foods/
That of course ties in with their Ayurveda concept of different doshas. So one food type may be good for you and terrible for someone else. Here a very good overview on this - http://www.holistic-online.com/ayurveda/ayv-basis-tri-dosha.htm ;
You will see that Indians generally stick to super old fashioned "products" like using food to cure skin issues or solely coconut oil for hair/almond oil for face type of home remedies on a daily basis. 
The only two brands I have ever really used more than once in India are called Himalaya - http://www.himalayadirect.com/products/allproducts.aspx (my personal observation though...product labeling of ingredients in India is not as tightly adhered to so who knows if all the stuff on the label is really all there is in any of them)
and Fab India products - http://www.fabindia.com/pages/personal-care/pgid-1127296.aspx (my impression is these are more natural but maybe they are simply better at branding their stuff!)

tedpan

It's all about what you eat. Drink water, eat fruit and veg and limit meat intake, cut out junk food and processed sugar. Your acne will be gone.

tedpan

tedpan wrote: »

It's all about what you eat. Drink water, eat fruit and veg and limit meat intake, cut out junk food and processed sugar. Your acne will be gone.

The poster had skin issues as a result of hormonal troubles, as medically diagnosed. All the water and clean food in the world doesn't change the fact that it was a health issue.

Diet has a lot to do with most things, but sometimes its just not that simple. You can't assume someone has skin trouble because of an unhealthy lifestyle.

sashafierce

This post has been deleted.

neonsofa

tedpan wrote: »

It's all about what you eat. Drink water, eat fruit and veg and limit meat intake, cut out junk food and processed sugar. Your acne will be gone.

Clearly never had hormonal acne.

Was vegetarian a few years back and so became obsessive about getting a balanced diet, ensuring I had all the nutrients I needed. My health improved, hair became glossier, had more energy..every health benefit that comes with a clean diet. Still got eruptions on my chin and along my jawline every month.

Now I have an unhealthy diet and still have the spots, but at least I can comfort myself by eating tasty chicken nuggets etc

wordofwarning

The best thing for decent skin is gycolic acid, that actually breaks down the skin to produce new skin as it can get deep into the skin. It is OTC and has actually hard research on it(it had a patient too).

There are prescription creams too that will give you better skin. Like gycolic acid, they can get deep into the skin and have a serious impact on the skin. A lot were designed to treat the likes of pre-cancerous skin cells, but were discovered to be amazing with acne. T

Face-masks, anti-aging creams etc are not really effective. It takes a strong chemical like gycolic acid or prescription only (well in Ireland, it is OTC in other countries) Retin-a to get deep into the skin to have a serious effect on skin to make it look better. Cosmetic companies don't want to admit a €12 prescription only tube of cream that will last you several months is the key to good skin. So they market Retinol instead, which has proven to be useless as unlike prescription only creams it can't get deep into the skin.

If you want better skin, go to a dermatologist. They will not tell you a €120 tube of retinol is in anyway useful, but you will likely need a prescription only cream.

sashafierce

This post has been deleted.

Morby

wordofwarning wrote: »

The best thing for decent skin is gycolic acid, that actually breaks down the skin to produce new skin as it can get deep into the skin. It is OTC and has actually hard research on it(it had a patient too).

There are prescription creams too that will give you better skin. Like gycolic acid, they can get deep into the skin and have a serious impact on the skin. A lot were designed to treat the likes of pre-cancerous skin cells, but were discovered to be amazing with acne. T

Face-masks, anti-aging creams etc are not really effective. It takes a strong chemical like gycolic acid or prescription only (well in Ireland, it is OTC in other countries) Retin-a to get deep into the skin to have a serious effect on skin to make it look better. Cosmetic companies don't want to admit a €12 prescription only tube of cream that will last you several months is the key to good skin. So they market Retinol instead, which has proven to be useless as unlike prescription only creams it can't get deep into the skin.

If you want better skin, go to a dermatologist. They will not tell you a €120 tube of retinol is in anyway useful, but you will likely need a prescription only cream.

Is Tretinoin (Retin A) actually available in Ireland? I looked into it before and rang my local pharmacy and they said that it was unlicensed here in Ireland. I also believe that it can no longer be got in the UK either. Can you even get it on prescription here?