Not to toot our own horn, but we’ve been talking about skin cycling years before it blew up on social media. In fact, board-certified dermatologist and mindbodygreen Collective member Whitney Bowe, M.D., FAAD (who coined the term “skin cycling”), has been discussing the concept with us from the beginning!
“It’s the same way you go to the gym,” she said on the mindbodygreen podcast back in 2020. “If you want to get your muscles and your body to be stronger, you have to alternate between periods of intense activity and recovery. And the same thing holds true for the skin barrier and the microbiome: They need days to recover.”
Essentially, skin cycling entails rolling through your active ingredients at night to prevent irritation. On night one, you exfoliate; night two is for retinol; then nights three and four are dedicated to simple, nourishing hydration (ceramides, hyaluronic acid, and the like). We’ve long been a champion of giving your skin barrier a break, so consider us sold.