It’s very common to have bothersome facial redness, because there are so many reasons the skin on your face can turn red. Luckily for you, we’ve put together a guide to reducing all the different types of redness. Find your redness type so we can get you the right type of solution.
Be Gentle to Your Skin
Redness often shows you that your skin is irritated. So your first step is to make sure you’re treating your skin as gently as possible.
Here’s what to stay away from so you successfully reduce red skin on your face:
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Avoid scrubbing or exfoliating aggressively
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Don’t use too many active ingredients at once
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Stop washing your face with hot water
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Try not to add new skincare products every few days
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Stay away from harsh cleansers
Once you have these vital steps in place, move on to identifying your redness type for specific guidance.
Find Your Facial Redness Type
We’ll describe five different ways your skin might look when you’re dealing with facial redness, and point you to the solution for that kind of redness.
The Stripped Redness
Stripped redness is blotchy and uneven. It’s not a uniform blush across your face, instead the redness covers your face in patches around different areas.
Along with the blotchy redness, you might also see your skin looking tight and unnatural, so tight it’s almost like saran wrap stretched too thin over your face. On the other hand, when you smile, speak, or laugh, you can see how your skin becomes crinkled like tissue paper around your mouth and on your cheeks.
Other telltale signs that you’re dealing with stripped redness are tiny, dry, whitish-gray flakes that looks kind of like peeling skin, but in a micro-version, or tiny textured clear bumps, hundreds of them, which are actually inflamed hair follicles.
This type of redness often stings and burns when it’s touched, letting you know that your skin ain’t happy.
If this description sounds similar to the redness you’re experiencing, then what you’re dealing with is a stripped skin barrier. Your skin comes with a wonderful protection system built in, a layer of fat cells that keeps moisture in and irritants out. When this barrier is stripped away, your skin gets easily irritated. That’s when it starts turning red.
Stripping your skin barrier can happen for a variety of reasons:
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Washing your face with hot water
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Scrubbing your face too hard
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Using Sodium Lauryl Sulfate in your shampoo or conditioner (it runs down your face!)
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Using too many active ingredients in your skincare routine
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Using a serum with a high percentage of active ingredient in it (over 10%)
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Cleansing or exfoliating multiple times a day
Other culprits of a stripped skin barrier could be a very dry climate, very harsh cleansers, or skipping moisturizer.
Before attempting any repair, go through this list carefully and see which of these might be responsible for stripping your skin barrier. Then, move onto a gentle skincare routine specifically meant to repair a stripped skin barrier.
Read this guide on how to repair a stripped skin barrier
The Permanent Blush Redness
Is your redness permanent? Wherever you go, whatever you do, this slightly sunburned redness follows you everywhere. It doesn’t cover your entire face, though. It sits mostly on the middle third of your face, across your nose, your cheek apples, and sometimes dots on the center of your forehead and chin. It spares the area around your eyes, though.
That’s your baseline color: a dusky red or pink. If you look really closely, you might see either spider veins coloring the redness, or tiny red bumps that somewhat look like acne, but don’t have the typical blackhead.
But then there are the days you suddenly get totally red, an intense flush you weren’t expecting. It can happen because of extreme temperatures, such as a very hot shower or a sharp winter wind. Or you’ll feel it when you eat spicy food, drink alcohol, or a hot drink. As soon as the trigger happens, you’ll feel your entire face flooded with redness. It’s an intense rush of blood to your face.
You feel an internal heat throbbing in your face when this happens, a heat that radiates outward and is visible on your face in a bright red color.
Is this you? If your redness matches this description, you might be looking at rosacea.
Rosacea is a chronic, inflammatory skin condition. Chronic meaning it’s long-term, so you need to manage it, not cure it. It happens when your facial blood vessels become overly reactive, so that they widen too much, too easily, especially in response to triggers.
If your redness is rosacea, it means your skin is super sensitive, and you’ll want to learn to treat it super gently. That includes how you wash it, what products you use in your skincare routine, and what you expose your skin to.
Read our complete guide to reducing rosacea redness here
The Leftover Spot Redness
What are those little red dots on your face? When you look in the mirror, these reddish or pinkish dots appear anywhere on your facial skin, sometimes in clusters but not connected to each other at all. Each dot looks like an individual stain on your skin.
If you raise your fingers to touch the spots, you’ll feel that the skin is totally smooth. It’s not bumpy, not pitted, it’s totally flat but definitely red.
Now that you’re brushing your fingers on your cheeks, take a moment to press one specific red spot. Did you see it disappear or turn red for a moment, until you released the pressure and then the redness came flooding back?
If yes, you’ve confirmed it. These spots are most likely your souvenirs from a recent acne outbreak on your skin. It’s called Post-Inflammatory Erythema, which basically means the redness that comes after inflammation. You can say PIE for short.
PIE happens because acne pimples often damage the blood vessels directly under your skin, so that when the bump disappears, you see the redness of the damaged blood vessel. To treat it, you’ll want products with ingredients that help repair the blood vessels.
Read our guide to PIE care
The Greasy, Flaky Redness
You’ll see this redness most in the creases next to your nostrils, between your eyebrows, and along your hairline. The flakes have a slight yellowish tinge, almost like they’re greasy. (Sorry for being so graphic, we just need to help you identify this right, okay?) You can also see these little flakes (they look like dandruff) at your hairline or behind your eyebrows.
In fact, if you look at the skin in the red patch, you’ll see that it does have a greasy shine, and it feels oily, not dry.
If these descriptions check out, you’re likely looking at seborrheic dermatitis. This redness and flakiness comes from having too much yeast fungus feeding off your body’s natural skin oils. Sometimes, people think this redness is dry skin, and they immediately use oil-rich moisturizers on their skin. Mistake! Moisturizers with oil feed the yeast and make the problem even worse.
Instead, you need anti-fungal ingredients and moisturizers without oil to starve the yeast and cure your seborrheic dermatitis.
Read our guide to seborrheic dermatitis here.
The Dry, Leathery Redness
This redness comes in patches, dry, rough skin patches that are awfully, awfully itchy. You might have the red patches on your cheeks or they can be on your eyelids and around your mouth. Here you also might have flakes, but not greasy yellowish flakes like seborrheic dermatitis, but rather white and powdery flakes that look ashy.
Once you have the red patches for a while, the skin can look wrinkled and leathery. It looks terribly raw and irritated, and that’s what it feels like, like your skin has no moisture and is parched.
These itchy, scaly, red patches are recognizable as atopic dermatitis, which is more commonly called eczema. Eczema is when your skin is missing the glue, the fatty lipids and oils it needs to create that lovely skin barrier we spoke about earlier, the layer that keeps moisture in and keeps irritants out.
When your skin is genetically missing these lipids, that leaves it completely unprotected, and irritants like dust and pollen can easily get in. That’s when you see the red, raw eczema flare ups, which is your immune system’s response to those annoying irritants.
To treat eczema, you want creams that flood your skin with lipids and create a thick barrier so that you don’t have to worry about irritants getting in.
Read our guide to treating eczema here