Skin Toner Guidelines - How To Use Toner Effectively

No beautician can miss a toner when mentioning the skincare world, an indispensable skin-care product for both day and night routine. To leverage the benefits of it, you should first know what is a toner, and how to use a toner properly.

Here, in this article, we’ve arranged all your necessary information about the toner. Let’s move on!   

1. What is a toner?

There are many aspects to define what a toner is. Here, we’ve prepared many perspectives from skin experts telling about what is skin toner.

Basically, a facial toner is the in-between skincare steps. It means that you use the toner after washing your face; however, before applying serum or moisturizer.

In other words, toner plays like a primer, which helps other skincare products penetrate your skin easily and quickly, New York-based dermatologist Arielle Kauvar says. Also, it can deliver skin a hit of moist and remove dead cells from your skin. 

Charlotte Cho, a licensed esthetician and the co-founder of Soko Glam, shares the same mindset with Arielle Kauvar. She tells Allure that:

“Think of toner as prep for your pores. It brings your skin back to its natural acidic state, sweeping impurities away and helping your skin absorb your skincare products”.

2. What are the benefits of toner for skin?

After defining what is a toner, let's study how toner benefits your skin. Actually, the number of toner benefits for skin is countless because it helps other skincare products to maximize their effects. Below are just basic benefits of toner for skin of all types!

• Pore Tightening

Larger pores can cause irritation and infections as they allow more toxins, oil, and dirt to go into your skin. Facial toners are beneficial for shrinking and tightening pores. Thus, they can prevent toxins and oils from staying in the skin. 

• pH balance

A pH balance of our skin ranges from five to six, which indicates the acid environment. However, the alkaline nature of cleanser or soap breaks this pH balance, making it rise into the alkaline range. Subsequently, skin dries out and the outer layer of skin loses its protective barrier’s function.

Therefore, using a toner is the perfect solution to restore the balance condition quickly.

• Detoxification

What makes toners a great investment is that it can remove smog, smoke, and other chemical residues from the skin. So that your skin will have a brighter and healthier look. In the long run, it can help prevent acne and wrinkles.

• Acne reduction

Ance is an awful pain for most of the beauties all over the world. They cause itchy, scars in your face as well as losing confidence for your entire look. Moreover, your skin will be dull with more oil.

Toners can decrease blemishes and acne by wiping away dead skin cells, residue, and oily build-up.  

• Skin protection

Not only toners assist in tightening pores after cleansing, but they can also lessen the possibility of impurity penetration and environmental contaminants to the skin. Also, they can even prevent your skin from minerals and chlorine in tap water.

• Nourishment and Hydration

Besides the effects of pH balancing, detoxification, or protection, toners play as the first moisturizer in a skincare routine. Toners provide hydration, which helps maintain smoothness, elasticity, and even boosts the youthful appearance for your skin.

Notably, some toners contain vitamins and other essential skin nutrients, which assist in creating healthy skin. 

• Ingrown hairs prevention

Yes, you read that right. Toners also bring grooming effects because they contain glycolic acid in their ingredients.

3. How to use a toner in the right way?

Understanding the meaning of toner and its benefits for the skin, you are now can go through the guidelines for how to use a toner. You can follow the three simple steps below to apply for both day and night routine.

• Wash your face

First and foremost, you should wash your face thoroughly with warm water and a suitable cleanser or soap. You can add sponge or use a cleansing machine in this step. 

Then, you use your fingers to massage gently from forehead to chin to remove the remaining makeup, dirt, and impurities. Next, you splash cold water to rinse out the bubbles from cleanser or soap. Coldwater will keep your skin elastical and healthy. Finally, use a soft cotton towel to dry your face.

• Soak a cotton pad with toner

You take out a cotton pad and dampen it with the toner. Then, you wipe your face evenly with this cotton pad. You need to make sure every part of your face (forehead, cheeks, chin) retains the liquid.

Please note that some types of toner can apply directly on you face skin without using a cotton pad. You can pour out the liquid into your bare hands, then tab your face gently until it soaks into your skin. 

• Wait a minute for the toner to dry

Thanks to its water-based texture, the toner can absorb fairly quickly into the skin. You need to let the toner sink deep into your skin by waiting for at least a minute before applying any skincare products. The entire procedure is simple, right?

4. Conclusion

In the end, you have studied about all fundamental knowledge of toners from the definition of what is a toner to how to use a toner effectively. Please keep waiting for the next articles to clarify about types of toners for each kind of skin.

More importantly, don’t forget to add a bottle of toner into your daily skincare routine. It will bring a plethora of benefits for your skin in the long term.