Olena Beley joined the skincare game in 2016, and ever since then she has been breaking myths, promoting true skin health, and teaching us all how to love our skin.
33 year old Olena Beley became “A truth-telling, myth-busting, skin health coach, and realist dedicated to helping you get the clearest, glowiest skin ever without pills, diets, or expensive treatments,” in 2016. Since then, she has acquired over 32 thousand Instagram followers and 26 thousand YouTube subscribers. Her goal is to share the skin care knowledge she has researched, personally experimented with and learned to help others dealing with skin issues.
Her most popular video, “How To Moisturize Your Skin Like A Pro (My now famous 3-Step Moisture Method™)” has 85 thousand views on YouTube. Olena both elaborates and breaks down her moisturizing method in 17 minutes. She begins with explaining the importance of moisturizing and its huge effect on the appearance of our skin, and how typically people only apply one product, after they shower, onto dry skin.
She says that this typical one step method of moisturizing is not only ineffective but drying to the skin. Applying only a lotion or emollient to your dry skin is not effective because it acts only to slow down trans epidermal water loss, otherwise known as the rate your skin releases water. Lotion creates a barrier, if you apply to dry skin it will lock in dryness. So what's the alternative? Olena Beley’s 3 step moisture method.
Water is moisture. After properly cleansing your face, we want the face to be damp but not dripping, and then we want to immediately move to step two before the water evaporates. If you try to apply a product to dry skin, you will run into a few issues. First, you will have to use more product, and second, you will have to use more force to spread the product evenly.
Having more product on your skin will make it more likely that your pores will clog; and tugging and stretching your skin can wear out elastin making your skin weaker and more sensitive. Both of these effects will age your skin. When our skin is moisturized, it looks plump and smooth. To achieve this, we must lock in the water.
A humectant draws moisture from the environment and from deeper levels of the skin, then retains that moisture on the surface of the skin. In this step, apply 3-4 drops evenly, this should be enough to cover your entire face excluding your lips and eyes. Step three, must also be done immediately following step two, or both the water and humectant will evaporate and leave your skin even drier.
This is especially important to remember for those in dry climates. The humectant will absorb the water on skin from step one. She suggests hyaluronic acid as a humectant, as it can retain 1000 times its weight in water. **Olena Beley does not recommend glycerin or aloe for step two because they can be sensitizing.
Otherwise known as a typical moisturizer. Here you only need to apply a pea sized amount of product evenly over the face. The point of this step is to seal in both the water and the humectant. When buying an emollient, Olena recommends that within the first five ingredients you should see capris caprylic or triglycerides. Triglycerides are made from oils, but they give emollient action without the clogging aspects. She also says to avoid oils for the skin altogether. Noting that, ANY oil is clogging for everyone and especially so for those with malassezia folliculitis or fungal acne.
**Olena Beley only recommends this additional step if you have extremely dry skin.
These types of molecules act similarly to emollients by slowing down water loss even further, trapping moisture on the surface layer of the skin. She recommends using a pea sized amount applied evenly. Some common occlusive ingredients are petrolatum and dimethicone. For this step, squalane is the only oil she recommends because it is similar to the naturally produced sebum. But she warns to only use in extreme cases, and even then it should be toward the end of a product's ingredient list.
*Additionally, Olena knows the importance of sunscreen in skincare. Sunscreen should be applied following the moisturizing method. When choosing a sunscreen, she says to keep in mind that higher SPF can dilute your moisturizer.
The key to this routine is that it is completed quickly! After these steps, your skin should feel almost normal. This may sound strange to many who are used to the usual residue left by moisturizing products, but moisturizing doesn't need to leave you feeling sticky.
Olena Beley has taken years to research products and their ingredients. After all that work, she can recommend that these 3 simple steps will benefit all skin types: normal, rosacea prone, eczema prone and acne prone. Through research, she found that this method is incredibly effective. If your skin is feeling tight, flaky, dry or dehydrated, you might want to look at your moisturizing routine. Olena Beley teaches us it isn't just important what products you use, but also how you use them.
Written by Kiana St. Onge
