Photo: Adobe Stock Save Story Save this story Save Story Save this story Bad habits: We're all guilty of them—and most aren't a big deal. Who hasn’t watched hours of Friends reruns with a bag of Cape Cod chips on a sleepless night? But then there are the bad habits that can sneakily sabotage our skin, and when wrinkles are looming, things get a little more personal. There’s the stuff we do mindlessly that can lead to hair breakage (what?), well-intentioned purchases that undermine our skin care’s wrinkle-smoothing potential (why?!), and good old-fashioned forgetfulness (we swear to wear sunscreen tomorrow).
When we asked dermatologists which bad habits they most wish people would break for the sake of their skin health, some answers were not surprising (wash your face before bed, don’t pop pimples ); but the advice they gave for breaking these tendencies and forming good habits instead was stuff we hadn’t been told before. They offered a wealth of simple, effective tips that might just help us crawl into bed with clean skin every night and protect it from the sun each day. (Put sunscreen next to our toothbrush? Genius! Our skin thanks you, Corey Hartman , MD!)
Each doctor interviewed mentioned that we should not be following skin-care trends blindly—our sincere apologies to the industry!—and to avoid giving up on a formula too quickly. “Skin care is a long game,” says Laurel Naversen Geraghty , MD, a board-certified dermatologist in Medford, Oregon. “It’s not how much you blast your face with new ingredients; it's the good, proven steps that you stick to over time.”
Here’s how to make that long game work in your favor—and how to recognize and quit all of the habits that might be undermining your skin along the way.
We shudder to think of candy-colored Juicy Couture tracksuits and low-rise jeans from the ’90s, but one day, we might also look back and wonder why we ever embraced slugging (remember when everyone was coating their face in petroleum jelly?) or bought so many peels. “We don’t need to be on some continual holy grail quest to find the ultimate new skin-care product,” says Dr. Geraghty, “and you shouldn’t feel like you need to throw every possible ingredient at your complexion or spend a lot of money to have healthy, glowing skin. Keep your regimen simple but consistent, relying on proven ingredients rather than trendy TikTok ones. Trends come and go, but your skin has to last you a lifetime.”
Shopping for new skin care has been a thing for as long as skin care has been a thing. But there’s a new, almost compulsive willingness to buy more, and to do so more frequently in order to keep up with what’s buzzy ( exosomes ! PDRN ! growth factors!). “The idea [is] that looking good for our time isn’t just about things like eyebrow shape; now it's how good your skin is,” says Ava Shamban , MD, a board-certified dermatologist in Los Angeles.
The worst-case scenario is spending a lot of money on products that ultimately wreak havoc on your skin. “I have some young, female patients who tend to overdo it—they pile on multiple active ingredients or products at once, or they keep throwing new treatments at their skin, over and over,” says Dr. Geraghty. They can wind up with skin reactions like bumps, flakes, or itchy rashes, she adds, or a generally compromised, fragile skin barrier. “These conditions can take time, a dermatologist consultation, and medication to calm and reverse.”
And just because a friend or rando…