What is Skin Brightening?
Skin brightening refers to restoring the overall natural glow of your skin. It focuses more on removing the dead, dull cells from your skin’s surface than on specific pigmentation spots.
Overall, brighter skin can be achieved using different strategies, products, and ingredients. When your goal is to improve your radiance and glow, the removal of dead cells and dullness is a critical step. This is primarily achieved through physical and chemical exfoliation using ingredients like SALICYLIC ACID AND VITAMIN C.
Beyond that, having bright and luminous skin involves general skin health – moisturization, sun protection, and hydration.
Reducing fine lines and wrinkles through consuming collagen supplements.
What is Skin Lightening?
Skin lightening specifically targets pigmentation.
This category would include skin lightening treatments aimed at skin whitening or bleaching; however, that is not the purpose of this video.
Targeting an overall reduction in all pigmentation so that it appears whiter is controversial, I’m not qualified to discuss many of these complexities rooted in colonialism and racially disparate beauty ideals. To properly bleach or whiten your skin requires prescription medications and physician supervision. Off-market use of specific chemicals and drugs like hydroquinone and mercury are associated with severe harm.
For general beauty and cosmetic use, targeting pigmentation is desirable to reduce the look of age spots, photodamage, melasma, scars, and post-inflammatory hyperpigmentation. This is where the overlap between brightening and lightening occurs. Targeting discoloration and the evenness of skin tone can be achieved using ingredients like GLYCOLIC ACID AND KOJIC ACID. Both these ingredients would also fall into the category of brightening agents based on how they work.
It's just semantics to pit brightening vs lightening against one another. The bottom line is that if you want radiant, glowing skin with minimized scars, spots, and marks, you will need to take a strategy that does it all.
#skincare #menskin #skinbrightening #skinlightening
