When it comes to keeping your skin healthy and getting that impossible to ignore glow, one of the most important factors is hydration.
Moisturizing face oils are less well-known than cream moisturizers, but the nutrients you can find in the best face oils are gold mines for upping your skin’s hydration levels.
Here, we’ll break down what a face oil is, go over some common questions around introducing face oil into your routine, and walk through how to make your new moisturizing face oil work for you!
What Is Face Oil?
While typically we think of cream moisturizers as the most important part of your skincare routine when it comes to hydrating, a moisturizing face oil can also be a powerhouse tool for helping to ensure your skin is getting the hydration it needs.
When you think of a face oil, the first things that may come to mind may be cleansing oils or serums that have an oil-like texture.
A true face oil is exactly what it sounds like — a mixture of oils.
Our Pure Radiance Oils are formulated with a variety of seed oils, which are gold mines for the antioxidants, vitamins, and minerals that help to support the skin barrier.
In addition to being deeply nourishing for your skin, our moisturizing face oils are designed to help seal in these nutrients and prevent your skin from losing moisture throughout the day.
What Should You Look For in Face Oil?
Most face oils will be a blend of different oils, so if you’re looking for a particular ingredient, you might have to do a little reading. In general, you should be looking for face oils that are mostly plant and seed oils.
A few common spotlight ingredients you’ll see when choosing your face oil include avocado, jojoba, almond, and other extracts that are high in omega fatty acids. Vitamin E is also a common component in face oils.
While we’ll acknowledge that these ingredients offer notable hydrating properties, they don’t offer the intensely nourishing and moisturizing capabilities of seed oils, which we use as the primary ingredients in our moisturizing face oils.
Our Pure Radiance Oils are formulated with an abundance of seed oils. Seed oils are bursting with antioxidants, vitamins and minerals, all of which work wonders for your complexion, no matter what your individual skincare concerns are.
Seed oils are also biocompatible, and are composed of smaller molecules. Because these smaller molecules resemble the natural oils your skin produces, your body will easily recognize seed oils and be able to absorb them — and their nutrients — quickly and easily.
In our Renew Oil, chia seeds and kiwi seeds help target signs of aging thanks to their rich omega 3 fatty acid content, while passion fruit oil and papaya seed oil help deliver visibly plump skin thanks to their absorption abilities, and watermelon and raspberry seed oil offer skin-supporting nutrients like vitamins A, B, C, and E to help give you your healthiest-looking skin yet.
In our Clear Oil, the seed oils of hemp, pumpkin, and grape work to balance sebum to help you achieve optimal pH balance.
In our Calm Oil, cucumber seed oil takes the spotlight, delivering soothing calming benefits as it absorbs into the skin, along with its phytosterols and linoleic acid, two nourishing fatty acids that hydrate and visibly plump skin.
Can I Use a Moisturizing Face Oil If I Have Oily Skin?
You might be reluctant to explore face oils if you have an oily complexion, or if you just don’t love the idea of an oily texture that you leave on your face. Our Pure Radiance Oils are designed with every skin type in mind — whether your complexion is dry and dull, oily and prone to breakouts, or even sensitive, our moisturizing face oils can help nourish your skin with the nutrients it needs to get that dewy glow.
In fact, our Pure Radiance Oils pretty much do it all, no matter what your skin’s needs are. Our moisturizing face oils are skinimalism at its best — with an intentional combination of powerful botanicals, they can fight signs of aging, keep your skin super hydrated, and leave your skin feeling healthy, clean, and glowing, all with one step and one product.
A good face oil should absorb into your skin pretty quickly, too, leaving you feeling smooth and hydrated without leaving an oily residue. Face oils basically act as an additional line of defense for your skin. They can create a seal on your skin, which locks in the moisture that’s already there, and help prevent a loss of hydration throughout the day. Aging and dry skin, especially, can benefit from one transformative step!
Face oils can also protect your skin from the elements with this seal. Dirt, bacteria, and toxins that might normally come into contact with your skin throughout the day and hide away in your pores can be kept at bay with a layer of face oil.
How Do Face Oils Differ From Cream Moisturizers?
If you read all of that and came away wondering if face oil is just another kind of moisturizer, the answer is both yes and no. Let us explain.
You could use a moisturizing face oil in place of your cream moisturizer in your routine, if you wanted to — some people may prefer the texture and feel of face oil to a traditional cream moisturizer.
That said, our moisturizing face oils are also powerful even all on their own, so if you decide to use them on those nights where you’re tempted to skip your full-on routine, our moisturizing face oil can help get your skin the restorative hydration it needs all in one step!
How Do Moisturizers Work?
In order to understand how moisturizing face oils can do their best work with your current skincare routine, let’s break down why using a moisturizing oil can be so beneficial to your skin.
When it comes to keeping your skin hydrated, there are three different ways to go about it: humectants, emollients, and occlusives.
- Humectants are ingredients like Hyaluronic Acid. Humectants are like magnets, attracting water to them and holding onto many times their weight in water. The humectant itself isn’t necessarily what is hydrating your skin, but they’re incredibly useful because they’re able to attract hydration both from other products you apply and from the air around you.
- Cream moisturizers are typically emollients. Emollients deliver moisture to your skin directly — it is what’s hydrating your skin, and applying an emollient ingredient to your skin will enable your body to absorb that hydration to keep your skin looking bright and healthy.
- Lastly, you have occlusives. Occlusives create a barrier around your skin to prevent it from losing water. Sound familiar? That’s because most moisturizing face oils are occlusives!
Because cream moisturizers keep your skin hydrated through a different process than moisturizing face oils, you can totally use both a cream moisturizer and a moisturizing face oil if you’d like to.
But one of the things we love most about our Pure Radiance Face Oils is that they can replace many different steps in your skincare routine — if minimalism is very much your vibe, we’d recommend considering skinimalism as the guiding light of your skincare routine.
While 10-step skincare routines may work for some, it can be a lot of work — and sometimes, more isn’t always better. If your complicated skincare regimen isn’t leaving you with the glow you were hoping for, consider our Pure Radiance Face Oils.
They’re as nourishing as a serum, have the powerful hydrating properties of cream moisturizers, and they leave your skin looking so fresh and dewy that you won’t even feel the need to reach for your foundation.
Just ask award-winning Actor and Producer Laura Dern, who found our Pure Radiance Face Oils so effective that she was confident enough to go on camera without foundation. And if it’s good enough for Laura… 😉
When Should I Apply Face Oil?
When you’re adding a new product to your skincare regimen, you can add it into your morning routine, evening routine, or both!
Some products have a very clear delineation when it comes to when they’re going to be more effective. For instance, people generally use Vitamin C during the day and Synthetic Retinol in the evening so as not to make their skin vulnerable to the sun at the wrong time (our Phyto-Retinol can be used both in the day and night, and even with Vitamin C — you’re welcome.)
Moisturizing face oils are a little less cut and dry. Working a moisturizing face oil into both your morning and evening routine can be an easy way to get hydrating benefits all day, everyday. Using it at either end of your routine can help protect your skin’s hydration levels, and, if you choose to use both a cream moisturizer and a moisturizing face oil, can help ensure that you’re locking in all the benefits from all of your moisturizers, morning and night!
How Do I Use a Moisturizing Face Oil?
The best thing about our Pure Radiance Face Oil is that it can suit your skincare routine no matter where you are on the spectrum. Whether you’re a devotee of a multi-step routine or are looking to take advantage of the moment skinimalism is having, there’s a way to make moisturizing face oil work for you.
For the Skinimalist
Skinimalism emphasizes a pared-down, simplified skincare routine. If you’re all about clear, glowing skin but haven’t been able to hop on board a routine that’s long enough to require you to block out extra time in your day, this is the movement for you.
Focusing and simplifying your routine means you can get that picture-perfect complexion while still allowing your natural beauty to shine through.
If this sounds like your jam, our Renew Pure Radiance Oil is a perfect place to start. It’s packed with fruit and seed oils like Watermelon and Raspberry Seed, which contain vitamins A, B, C, and E. On top of that, it’s brimming with antioxidants and has the bonus of being an impactful hydrator.
After you cleanse (we recommend our Ginger Turmeric Cleansing Balm), you can use our Renew Pure Radiance Oil to replace your foundation, since your skin will be glowing so radiantly you won’t need anything else!
Just top off this skincare superhero with some SPF, and you’re good to glow.
For the Fan of a Full Routine
If you love your 10-step routine, we get it. If you want to keep your routine but are interested in working a moisturizing face oil into your routine, that’s totally doable, too.
You can use a moisturizing face oil both in the morning and in the evening.
If you have breakout-prone skin, you may want to try our Clear Pure Radiance Oil in the mornings, in place of your usual cream moisturizer — this means after cleansing and serums if you use them, but before SPF. Formulated with antibacterial Helichrysum and seed oils picked for their ability to promote balance when it comes to your pores’ oil production and to combat breakouts, it’s the perfect way to keep your skin hydrated and clear.
If you have sensitive, irritated, or pregnancy skin, our Calm Pure Radiance Oil can help soothe and comfort skin. Calendula oil works to ease sensitized, irritated skin, ginger root can help soothe redness, while cucumber seed oil works to calm skin and help the formula absorb efficiently into skin.
If you have normal to dry skin, our Renew Pure Radiance Oil is one of our best sellers — it’s clinically proven to outperform a leading anti-aging moisturizer. With a collection of seeds including chia, kiwi, papaya, watermelon, and raspberry, this powerful formula works to target signs of aging by giving your skin the hydration and nutrients it needs to thrive.
Top it off with our rich, luxurious Chebula Extreme Cream to deliver a boost of hydration and antioxidant benefits that will work through the night to nourish skin.
In Conclusion
Whether you’re using a moisturizing face oil in combination with a cream moisturizer or in place of typical hydrators, face oils are an ideal product to add to any skincare lineup.
If you’re looking to reduce the appearance of fine lines, diminish the look of wrinkles, or just improve your complexion’s brightness and evenness overall, keeping your skin moisturized is key.
Shop True Botanicals Moisturizers and Face Oils here.
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