GREETINGS STEEMIANS!!

I am present, I had a wonderful weekend working and doing homework, and after feeling exhausted and realizing I still have to wait till like, FOREVER for my camera to arrive, I should still put my ass into gear and give you guys something productive, positive, or useful.

AND SO! Using my most INCREDIBLE, WORLD CHANGING FORMULA of taking pictures, putting filters, and sticking emojis on it, I shall provide you an important introductory guide to getting into a habit that will raise your self-esteem and make your body thank you for it!

That awesome habit is GOOD SKIN CARE!

This will be the first of a list of installments for how to slowly but steadily increase your daily routine into that of maximum beauty skin out-put. This will be intended for beginners. And before you get all huffy and puffy with me, super manly fellas in the audience, for suggesting you start putting on cream and taking care of your skin and face and whatever,

EXCUSE ME SIR I TAKE CARE OF MY SKIN EVERY DAY AND I'M THE EPITOME OF A MASCULINE MANLY MAN.

Sorta. Kinda. As of writing this, my habits have certainly left me empty in the girlfriend department, BUT MOVING ON.

The items you see above, for the most part, are all you will need to starting out with taking care of your skin, save one extra item that I will cover later in this tutorial.

You may or may not have the same facial cleanser as me as the one that is visualized in the picture.

That's okay.

The basic Cetaphil Gentle Facial Cleanser contains these following ingredients :
water
cetyl alcohol
propylene glycol
sodium lauryl sulfate
stearyl alcohol
methylparaben
propylparaben
butylparaben

And no, I'm not being paid to advertise Cetaphil. But if I WAS, that would be awesome. (lookin' at you, Cetaphil CEO dude or dudette)

Most knock-off, drug-store brand gentle facial cleansers contain the exact same ingredients in the same proportions. Just pick that up, and you will be fine.

Alternatively, you can be lazy and just grab the first facial cleanser you see, but try to stick to the one with the least ingredients as possible. All other imbalances can be handled with other products and masks, which we will discuss in further tutorials.

So first things first, go ahead and wash off your skin. I usually do this before I shower. Get a good pump of that cleanser, smear it on your face, and give it a good rub down before you wash it off with warm water.

• Next, AFTER you have showered if you choose to do so, you will grab your trusty CUCUMBER, and cut it into pieces like you will see in the following image.

The next thing you shall do is take one of your slices of cucumber, and rub it ALL OVER YOUR FACE. ALL OVER. TURN IT OVER WHEN IT GETS DRY. Pick up another when its done and smear more on. Your face must be COVERED in cucumber juice.

It puts the cucumber on its skin or else it gets the hose again 8)

"Daddy Shah, why are we smearing cucumber on our face?"

Because this is called a Toner and what we are doing is Toning your skin. Cucumber juice has been supported as providing a lot of excellent benefits for your skin, ranging from tightening your skin to protecting it from UV rays. Scroll to the bottom of that link and open up the references, and you can see some actual research was put into these claims. Don't believe me? Do your own research!

Toning in general is done to better the look of the skin, reduce uneven tones, take out oil and reduce the size of pores. It's great to get into the habit of treating your skin with something, and you should see improvements if you do this every day for a couple weeks. Unless you are allergic to cucumber, there shouldn't be anything wrong with giving it a chance!

Next on your agenda is to put on a Daily Moisturizer that has SPF protection.

Once again, I will suggest Cetaphil, because it generally has a low amount of ingredients and is geared towards people with sensitive skin who don't want to risk irritation. But any daily moisturizer with protection against the sun will work. I use SPF 50 because I am an OCD maniac who wants their skin to look and feel like a 2 week old infants'. You can use SPF 15 or whatever you feel comfortable with.

IF YOU HAVE GOTTEN THIS FAR AND OBEYED ME, GOOD JOB! GO ABOUT YOUR DAY, AND WHEN NIGHTTIME COMES...

... Pick up your cleanser and wash your face off. You should be washing your face in the morning AND in the evening. If you want to be especially diligent, you can even go ahead and reapply your SPF moisturizer through the day to keep up the protection against the sun-rays, and help reduce signs of aging / protect against skin cancer.

At this point, you can either use some more cucumber slices before you go to bed, or proceed to the next step right away and ignore the cucumber. Try to get the cucumber in once a day though. It's cheap, it probably won't kill you (if you are allergic then I will have my lawyers contact your lawyers mmk) and it will get you in good habits for taking care of yourself.

But before you go to bed, you need to moisturize your skin again. You can't use the SPF moisturizer because it's generally not advisable to have sunscreen on your face at night as well. You will need a normal moisturizer.

• You can go ahead and purchase a Cetaphil moisturizer without SPF for your face, they come in tubs similar to my cleanser... Anything else that is super basic and off the shelf will do too. You put that on, you go to bed, and BAM! You are done for the day, the beginners duties are complete and you get your first badge for taking care of your face, like me!

• You can also go right ahead and apply the same moisturizer to your hands and body, if you have some Shea Butter (which we will bring up again in a later intermediate tutorial) you can also go ahead and rub that ALL OVER YOUR SKIN.

OR you can be a rebel, and do what I do. Don't do this if you have especially oily skin though, it won't help you one bit!

I'm serious with those emojii, a lot of people in the beauty industry would HATE ME and gasp for suggesting to use ANY vaseline on your face, unless you are Tyra Banks in that one episode where she went kinda' crazy and started screaming about rubbing this stuff all over her to get model-shiny skin.

But hear me out! First, this isn't just basic Vaseline. This is intended as an actual moisturizer, and though it DOES have petroleum jelly, it isn't stacked to heck with it like the normal version.

Second, I only use a tiny little bead of it for maybe half of my face, and I use half of this amount on my nose and chin. I am exceptionally conservative with how I rub this stuff on me, because I know from experience that too much will cause my skin to want to break out, and since I am still kind of young and on a stupid medication that makes my skin break out even MORE, I have to be careful with it.

The point is though, it does do the job, and because I only have to use this TEENY WEENY minuscule drop to cover my entire face (this stuff glides and spreads like you wouldn't believe) it becomes EXTREMELY cost effective for me to buy one bottle of this, versus using a larger squirt of a smaller container of moisturizer.

In the end though, regardless of the products YOU end up choosing to replace the ones I chose, your skin will thank you for putting in the effort.

TL;DR

1. Wash face with Cleanser
2. Tone with cucumber
3. Moisturize (SPF Day, None at night)

In future tutorials, we will go over more advanced toners, I will provide you with a huge resource on ingredients and how to tell if what you are putting on your skin is good or not, and we will discuss exfoliatiating, serums, night creams, bath salts (not the crazy kind) and even diet to help you manage the huge organ on your body that is your skin.

And if you need a reason to really care about your skin, remember that your skin is the first thing that people will see, it is the thing your flesh-prison lives in, and it is ultimately something you are going to deal with for the rest of your life. We know people can be shallow, but it hurts no one and only helps YOU, both in health and in vanity, to spend a bit of time and money in caring for yourself, just like you would with working out or picking a healthy diet.

And with that...

BYEEEEE. HAVE A GREAT DAY. MAKE REPLIES AND BE MY FRIEND! FOLLOW IF YOU ARE INTRIGUED FOR MORE.

... Also I am totally not a doctor and if you spontaneously start spasming because you touched cucumber or put a lotion on your skin, I HAVE THIS ITALIC FONT TO CLARIFY I AM NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR DEATH.

So there. x'D

Credits : Curejoy for providing the article on cucumber AND their reference list in support of it, Cetaphil, Vaseline, my best friend / God sis' Christine for getting me into skin care and teaching me her master-jedi ways, Buffalo bill, and me! ;)

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P.S.

Should I get a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 copyright for any potential chapters of my fiction project I post on here? I was thinking on that, I wasn't too sure. I know I am like, a big NOBODY who probably doesn't have to worry that much about someone stealing my crap, but on the same note I like to be professional and safe with what I do.