How To Keep Your Skin Care Products Fresh & Clean

You wouldn’t drink from a milk bottle every day and put it back in the fridge, so why would you continue bad practices with your skin care products?

We're sharing 5 tips to keep your skin care products from going bad.

Stow away your skin care

You don’t keep your cosmetic products in the fridge, but maybe you should.

Keeping your skin care products away from light and moisture is the best way to preserve them.

By leaving them exposed to light you risk degrading the efficacy of their ingredients, making your products less potent.

Moisture also makes for a strange bedfellow for your products, because unchecked moisture is a breeding ground for bacteria and can lead to mold and other nasty growths in your creams, lotions and lipsticks.

Keep your products in the fridge to extend freshness! It’s moisture free and out of the light.

Don’t touch that!

Keep your hands to yourself and let the spatula do the work.

For products in pots and jars, like your moisturizer or eye cream, you risk introducing dirt and bacteria into them every time you put your fingers in there.

Now imagine those products sitting for months on your shelf, with everything that was under your nails multiplying -- not a pleasant site to envision.

Tweeze does it 

Tweezers are for more than just plucking out; they’re great for picking up too.

Use them to grab things you’d normally use your fingers for, like cotton rounds and sheet masks.

This saves you from contaminating your nice jar of eye pads or getting grime on the rest of your sheet masks if they’re not individually wrapped.

Every chance you get to minimize contamination of your products makes their shelf life that much longer.

Clean products are happy products.

Check dates

You can do the greatest job in the world of preserving your cosmetics, but if you don’t mind the dates, the preservation won’t matter if your product is expired.

Be sure to check the "best by date" on your products, and also pay attention to the PAO (period after opening symbol).

It should look like a little open jar with a number of months in it, like 3, 6 or 12 months.

This means after breaking the seal on your product, don’t keep it for longer than indicated.

Never share from the same jar

You may be best friends who share clothes, cars and closet space, but cosmetics is a no-no.

We know that you would never stick your finger in a jar of cream after reading this handy-dandy guide, but your friend may not have read this, and you can be sure she’s going for the scoop, sans spatula.

Hand your friend a clean spatula and let them go to town, but be sure to clean and disinfect it afterwards.