7 Tips to Help Brighten Your Complexion

We all want a healthy, bright complexion. If you have clear skin, it's one less then to feel insecure about. If you have a dull complexion, it's hard to feel good about yourself, but a brighter complexion is attainable. When you look at your diet, your lifestyle and your daily skin care habits, you might find what's causing your dull skin.

Read on to see 7 tips to help brighten your complexion. While you can't change your genetics, a brighter complexion is achievable with a little work.

1. Minimize Alcohol
Alcohol, while healthy for your body in moderation, can dehydrate and dull your skin. It can also increase the blood flow to the skin's surface resulting in a flushed appearance that over time can become permanent. Keep your alcohol intake at a minimum for healthy looking skin.

2. You Are What You Eat
Did your mom ever tell you that when you were growing up? While the common thought that food causes your acne is false, the food you eat does affect the health of your skin.

Try eating more foods high in essential fatty acids, such as fish - especially salmon, walnuts and flax seed. Essential fatty acids are crucial to healthy skin because they help boost collagen and help with cell formation, deep under the skin's surface. This aids in counteracting or slowing down your skin's aging. You can think of it as feeding or nourishing your skin from within. Here are some more healthy skin foods and 5 vitamins for healthy skin.

3. Out With the Old - Slough Off Dry Skin
One skin care tip that I always try and share is that no matter how hard you try, you can not moisturize dead skin. Dead skin is dead, dry and flaky and it's not going to go away with moisturizer. You might notice this on your legs in the winter; as often as you try to moisturize, if you don't exfoliate, your ashy skin will always come back as soon as the moisturizer wears off.

Exfoliation is key to a brighter complexion and you can exfoliate many different ways. You can use a washcloth daily for gently exfoliation, you can use a daily exfoliating cleanser, a exfoliating treatment product or go deeper with a microdermabrasion or skin care brush. If you exfoliate on a regular basis, you are consistently sloughing off the dead skin which is a crucial step to a brighter complexion.

4. Start Your Day With Vitamin C
Sure, a dose of orange juice loaded with Vitamin C is good for keeping colds away, but Vitamin C is a power-packed antioxidant that fights off the signs of aging and is also a known skin brightening agent, too! Definitely something your skin would benefit from.

There are quite a few skin care product lines that have complete Vitamin C sets priced from high end all the way to budget. Our favorite is The Body Shop's Vitamin C line, specifically their Vitamin C Facial Radiance Capsules which are little individual daily capsules that you break open and apply to your skin after washing, but before moisturizing. Users can't get enough of them.

There are drugstore lines, as well, that offer Vitamin C lines such as Avalon Organics and Jason Natural.

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