Daytime calls for a light lotion; use a moisturizer/sunscreen combo such as Amarté Ultra Veil Sunscreen to lighten your product load. According to Kraffert, the UV-blocking properties of sunscreen will prevent other ingredients from reaching your skin, so SPF should always come last. "Sunscreen active ingredients are meant to not be absorbed," says Kraffert. If you're using a separate moisturizer and sunscreen, use the moisturizer first, then layer the sunscreen on top of it.
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P.M. Step 1: Remove & Cleanse
Straight from the desk of the skin care gods: Thou must remove thy makeup before slumber. Start with an oil-based makeup remover (check these reader-approved options for top-rated removers) for your eyes, which should wipe that heavy eyeliner right off. For heavy makeup, use a wipe to remove the bulk of the day's camouflage. However, don't stop there. Kraffert says that wipes are great in a pinch, but they don't usually remove everything -- or if they do, they leave a residue behind. "Without water to help remove [the makeup], it's a fail," he says. Follow up with a cleanser (the same gentle exfoliator used in the morning works) to get the rest of the job done.
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P.M. Step 2: Tone
This is a good trick to catch any remaining vestiges of makeup that your cleanser -- however vigilantly you scrubbed -- didn't catch. Look for something non-drying, with a low percentage (if any) of alcohol. We like Kiehl's Cucumber Herbal Toner for its gentle formula.
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P.M. Step 3: Prescriptions & Treatments
Just like during the day, apply any prescriptions right next to your skin. This includes your lighteners, your brighteners, your acne zappers and your wrinkle reducers.
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P.M. Step 4: Tap on Eye Cream
Pat on an eye cream that contains retinol or peptides, like Olay Pro-X Eye Restoration Complex, formulated with caffeine and vitamin B3, or Amarté Eyeconic Eye Cream containing 3.8 percent retinol, since the next step will lock in those reparative ingredients so they can do their work while you snooze.
What comes first? Forget the chicken and the egg, we're talking about our skin care products, like serum, moisturizer, face oil and sunscreen. A cabinet full of products to keep you blemish-, wrinkle- and sun spot-free means nothing if you don't know in what order to apply them. Instead of slapping them on and crossing our fingers, we conducted a skin care nerd-out session with board certified dermatologists Dendy Engelman, M.D., and Craig Kraffert, M.D., who is also the president of Korean skincare line Amarté. We grilled them to find out which products should be applied first, last and everywhere in between so that they can perform exactly as they're supposed to. Here, these derms school us in the exhaustive process of layering skin care.
