As you probably already know, there are a ton of creams, serums, and cleansers out there designed to help your skin. But some of the best beauty ingredients out there may just be in your...kitchen!
Here are five ingredients that experts love for their beauty-boosting properties:
• Papain. This enzyme, found in papayas and pineapples, gently eats off dead skin cells, decongesting clogged pores and helping with skin texture and cell turnover. You can blend up a fresh papaya and use it as a mask, or crush some papaya enzyme tablets into your moisturizer to make a hydrating, gently exfoliating mask.
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• Olive oil. Olive oil is a great cleanser and moisturizer; it's an amazing makeup remover, and you can get it all off afterwards with a little face wash. Putting a drop on any dry body skin you might have or acne scabs will also soften them up.
• Green tea. This anti-inflammatory calms skin and also has tons of antioxidants. Washing your face with chilled green tea is a great way to get rid of redness, and to calm down irritated skin, just put matcha (powdered green tea) in your favorite face mask.
• Allantoin. Don't let the fancy name fool you. This stuff is just comfrey extract. What makes it so great for your skin is that it's a keratolytic and assists in desquamation. In layman's terms, it...
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...helps skin slough off (the desquamation part) and softens the keratin in skin, too, which helps it retain moisture and look smoother. You can raid your spice drawer and make a comfrey and honey mask, or buy allantoin cream to try it in its purest form.
• Caffeine. Have problems with redness or dark circles under your eyes? Caffeine is a vasoconstrictor, meaning it shrinks veins, reducing the appearance of redness and blue from poorly oxygenated blood. It's not permanent, but it does offer a great quick fix.
