The Ultimate Self-Care Routine Checklist: Skincare Edition

Sometimes after a long day, all you need is a little TLSC: Tender Loving Self-Care. While you may be thinking of picking up a good book and fixing yourself a cup of herbal tea, we have a few other self-care ideas to help care for the real MVP — your skin.

What Is Self-Care and Why Does It Matter?

Self-care is a crucial part of maintaining a balanced life. Physical self-care can include taking care of your body through healthy habits such as drinking water, eating a balanced diet, getting plenty of physical activity and hours of sleep, and getting some fresh air.

Your self-care checklist should also extend beyond your physical health. Consider spending more time on self-care activities like practicing self-love, having regular check-ins with loved ones, adding positive affirmations, and making use of fun distractions to improve your quality of life and contribute to personal growth.

One way to combine both realms of self-care is to put together a skincare self-care routine. Your skin works hard all day to keep you looking beautiful and feeling healthy — it deserves a break. Taking a moment to show your skin some love can provide you with a moment to slow down and take stock of your mental health and emotional health. 

With that in mind, here are some of our favorite self-care tips to incorporate better care into your skincare routine.

How Can I Make a Daily Self-Care Checklist?

Speeding through your skincare routine can be tempting, especially if you often find yourself in a hurry. But by giving a bit more thought and consideration to the products you’re using and making sure you have some time to savor the experience of caring for your body, you can turn a daily chore into a moment of relaxation.

Swap Your Shower for Bath Scrubs and Soaks Once in a While

Carving out time for an evening bath or a Sunday morning soak can go a long way toward making yourself feel pampered.

 Research shows that a half-hour bath at 104℉ can improve feelings of depression, decrease feelings of stress, and support a regulated mood. Plus, baths are a great way to allow yourself time to think and process the day. 

So get out your favorite relaxing candle (we recommend Lavender), dim the lights, and enjoy your bath’s mental and emotional benefits.

To achieve peak relaxation, start by pouring two scoops of our Nature Bathing Forest Bath Soak into your tub to help fill the room with a calming, beautiful scent. Our therapeutic bath soak will transport you to nature and provide an indulgent escape from the stress of modern-day life. Your skin will be left glowy, soft, and hydrated.

This bath soak helps nourish and hydrate your skin with moisturizing Aloe Powder and Jojoba Oil and the fragrant scents of Pine Bark Extract and Clove Bud Oil. It’s like a bubble bath for adults, but better.

On those days when you can fully lean into your bathtime ritual, our Pure Radiance Sugar Exfoliating Body Scrub makes that long, luxurious soak more irresistible than ever. This formula uses a tried-and-true blend of natural ingredients, like Organic Sugar, Sandalwood, Rich Camellia, Jojoba Oils, and Kaolin Clay, to scrub away dead skin cells without disrupting your skin barrier. 

The result? Soft and smooth-looking skin, with an intoxicating essential oil blend of Orange Peel, Cedarwood, and Sandalwood to boot.

Our Pure Radiance Sugar Exfoliating Body Scrub leaves you with soft, smooth, hydrated, and glowing skin, as opposed to traditional exfoliants that are made with sharp-edged ingredients that may create micro-tears in the skin. 

It’s also formulated with small molecule seed oils, which means that the nutrients, antioxidants, and hydrating properties absorb into your skin easily, rather than feeling heavy on your skin and slippery on your bathtub floor, like lesser body scrubs made with nut or coconut oils.

If you want to go one step further, our Bum Scrub is a great way to add an extra moment of self-love to your bath time routine. This supercharged, multitasking scrub exfoliates, cleanses, and nourishes the skin, leaving your body looking softer, smoother, and more blemish-free than ever. 

Our Bum Scrub works with finely-milled Bamboo Powder, Coconut Husk, and Soft-shaped Jojoba Beads to slough away dead skin cells and Black Willow Bark Extract to help balance oil-prone skin to help you kiss breakouts goodbye. 

The formula also boasts an indulgent blend of Moringa, Coffee, and Safflower Seed Oils to moisturize and nourish the skin. Whether you’re looking for a solution to booty breakouts or just want to get your glow on from head to bum, this is the scrub for you.

While baths are amazing at helping balance stress levels and are a wonderful form of emotional self-care, you can have too much of a good thing. No matter how many hydrating oils you use, taking baths on a daily basis can dry out your skin. We recommend bathing anywhere from one to three times weekly for the best results.

Hydrate and Moisturize Your Body

Hydration is a potent addition to your self-care practices when combined with a luxurious bath or shower routine —but it’s also a good daily habit for keeping your skin feeling and looking youthful and radiant. 

Hot baths can dry out your skin by leaching out your natural oils, so it’s important to moisturize your skin after a bath. As an added self-care bonus, you can thank your body for all it does by giving it a massage as you apply your moisturizer. Massage can support healthy collagen production, which leads to the appearance of healthier and fuller skin.

Start by hydrating your skin from head to toe with our Pure Radiance Body Oil. This rich, elegant oil is a perfect all-over addition to your morning or evening skincare routine. It’s pregnancy-safe, ultra-nourishing, and made of natural, biocompatible oils that help reveal glistening, silky skin from head to toe. 

Pure Radiance Body Oil is also packed with antioxidant-rich seed oils and omega-3 fatty acids, just like our nourishing face oils. 

Cold-pressed ingredients like Hemp Seed and Sandalwood help replenish your skin while nourishing Omega Fatty Acidssupport your skin barrier. Plus, natural biocompatible ingredients allow this silky oil to absorb seamlessly so that your skin is left glistening and soft, never greasy or sticky.

Hydration is key to resisting signs of aging, so if moisturizing oils aren’t your thing, our Pure Radiance Body Butteris the way to go. It takes moisturizing your body from a mundane skincare step to a luxurious experience with the most sumptuous formula and scent notes of Citrus and Sandalwood that transport you to a lush Northern California forest.

Natural-biocompatible ingredients like Jojoba Oil, which mimics the lipid content of the skin, make this body butter formula melt upon contact and absorb quickly.Kokum & Tucuma Seed Butters deliver essential fatty acids to lock moisture in and leave skin looking nourished and glowy, never greasy. Your skin will drink it up!

Another star in your self-care ritual could be our ultra-rich Boob Cream — especially when you’re planning on putting the girls center stage in tonight’s outfit. This cream is an ultra-rich, luxurious moisturizer that works to firm, plump, and tone the skin of the breast and décolleté area with nature’s most hydrating oils and butters.

With ultra-moisturizing ingredients like Rosehip, Coconut, and Jojoba Oils, this cream will help to visually plump and tone the skin around your décolleté, which can be thinner and more fragile than other areas of your body. A special Peach Butter also helps lessen the appearance of crepiness, and a mix of Ylang Ylang, Neroli, and Frankincense keeps your skin smelling fresh.

Pro tip: Mix a bit of our Vitamin C Booster into your boob cream to give your complexion a lift and take your self-care to the next level.

Our Vitamin C Booster harnesses the supportive power of Ferulic Acid alongside Vitamin C to supercharge your favorite water-based moisturizer. 

Our Vitamin C Booster visibly brightens and smooths skin while minimizing the appearance of dark spots by increasing cell turnover. And unlike most Vitamin C products, which come in an easily oxidized liquid form, our Vitamin C comes in a powder form, which is more stable and more potent.

We recommend not only incorporating moisturizer into your self-care plan but also your evening and morning routines. Our moisturizing creams and oils help your skin feel good and look even better.

Utilize Essential Oils

If you’re interested in finding time for self-care but don’t know when you’ll be able to slow down, essential oils are a great way to quickly pamper yourself throughout the day. For instance, you can set up an essential oil diffuser in your home or workspace to fill the room with refreshing or relaxing scents like orange and lavender.

You can also work essential oils into your daily routine in the form of a roller applicator. Our Stress Relief essential oil blend is infused with Tarragon and Frankincense, which have been used for centuries to ground emotions. Rolling on the light, elegant scent with its woodsy, herbal, and floral notes can help calm and support your mood.

Our Stress Relief oil blend is best for busy women on the go. Whenever you feel stressed, a simple swipe of this calming roll-on might just do the trick!

If you find yourself constantly on the go, our Immune Boost essential oil blend is just what you need to help you perk up when you’re feeling under the weather. The fresh, effervescent scent is designed to support a sense of comfort, wellbeing, and energy for some added pep in your step.

While it’s no replacement for an appointment with your primary care physician, our Immune Boost blend may stave off those feelings of ick until your appointment.

The best thing about these portable essential oil blends is that you don’t have to change your schedule or plans. You can use them on the go, between meetings, or while decompressing in your car before your next appointment. Just swipe some on your pulse points, and relax into the beautiful scent for a few treasured minutes. It’s like portable self-care! 

Take Advantage of Serums

Gratitude journals and self-care planners are great elements of your pampering to-do list, but the best way to pamper your skin is with a nutrient-dense serum. 

Serums are the most effective way to infuse your skin with good-for-you ingredients because they’re designed to absorb fast into your skin. Serums also typically use higher concentrations of vitamins and minerals, so your skin gets more of the good stuff!

Our Chebula Active Serum is a great way to jumpstart your skincare routine. After sunscreen, the most important way to prevent and fight signs of aging is with antioxidants. Unfortunately, traditional antioxidants tend to stop working after they’ve fought off a free radical — which means that antioxidant-rich products get less effective throughout the day.

Chebula is special. It’s what’s known as a cascading antioxidant, which means once it finishes fighting off one free radical, it reacts by taking on a new form and moving on to fight another. 

Chebula is one of the most bioactive and powerful antioxidants in nature and helps to minimize the appearance of fine lines and wrinkles, visibly even skin tone,smooth roughness, and give the look of firmer and brighter skin. 

In addition to Chebula itself, our Chebula Active Serum features healthful ingredients like Echinacea Extract, Ginger Root Extract, and Aloe Vera to fight signs of aging and help prevent future damage. No matter your age, skin type, or skin tone, this is the serum for you.

Mask Up

A face mask is a great way to take a moment to yourself while addressing your specific skincare needs in a focused way. While you wait for your mask to work its magic, you can listen to a podcast or read a book — whatever makes you feel like your best self.

Our Resurfacing Moisture Mask works to exfoliate and smoothe the skin for a glowing, refreshed complexion. 

Whereas other exfoliating masks may strip your skin and leave you feeling tight and parched, our mask is infused with nourishing Avocado Butter to moisturize and Astaxanthin to support soft, youthful-looking skin. 

Our Resurfacing Moisture Mask also features Lactic Acid to support your skin barrier while sloughing away dead surface skin cells. If you’re looking for even-toned, bright, and replenished skin, our mask can help with that.

In Conclusion

Your own self-care habits may seem like an unnecessary part of your daily life, especially if you keep a busy schedule. But it’s crucial to your health, and neglecting self-care can lead to long-term physical and mental problems. 

True Botanicals can help take care of your skincare routine so you can take care of what’s most important: you.

Sources:

Societal Pandemic Burnout: A COVID Legacy | International Wound Journal

Self-Care | Active Minds

Reasons to Take a Bath | Cleveland Clinic

Skin Anti-Aging Strategies | Dermato-Endocrinology