In my 12 years as a dermatologist, one of the most common questions my patients ask me every day is, does skin care work? Is it an IQ tax? If not, how the hell am I supposed to choose?

Because most of the patients are women, they are particularly concerned about skin problems, and often fantasize about whether there is any special skin care products that can solve their current skin problems in the short term.

I must emphasize: No! When you have this idea, you should pay attention, and the next is likely to be harvested by bad businesses! Watch out!

That's why I've always stressed the importance of focusing on long-term skin health, not having the illusion of immediate results, but setting rational expectations for beauty.

I'm here to answer a few of your most concerned questions.

Do skin care products really work? Is it an IQ tax?
Conclusion first: It depends. Some are useful, some are useless and even counterproductive.

In fact, good skin is mainly determined by genetics and age. It is of course unrealistic to expect which skin care products will make your skin immediately visible improvement, but if you can properly use the right skin care products for you, it can help you improve the skin condition to a certain extent, and for some skin problems can play a role in protecting and repairing.

What is a useful skin care product? It is necessary to understand the purpose of your skin care and what skin care products can bring you.

In general, skin care products can be useful if they do one of the three things: cleaning, moisturizing, and protecting (sun protection), because the core of skin care is gentle cleansing, proper moisturizing (maintaining the integrity of the skin barrier), and preventing harmful factors from damaging the skin (including sun protection).

Moisturizing and protecting is especially important, especially as we age. Because the skin still has sufficient oil secretion when young, the lipid barrier of the skin is not easy to be destroyed, but with the increase of age, the skin oil secretion is gradually reduced, and the skin is more prone to rough, desquamation, chapping and other problems, moisturizing is particularly important.

Sun protection is the same, long-term do not do any sunscreen measures, the long wave of ultraviolet rays will cause dermal damage to the skin, to a certain age after the accumulation of damage wrinkles, stains and even sun-related tumors will gradually appear, then superb medical beauty means can only temporarily alleviate the appearance of aging, and there is no way to reverse the damage of light aging inside the skin cells.

And those that are useless or even counterproductive skin care products, or claims to remove acne pits, shrink pores, reverse age, or add powerful hormones, can only be considered IQ taxes or even "toxic" skin care products.

Based on the above, you will still have the following doubts.