Facial skincare advice needed

[Notjustanymum]

I used to use makeup daily, and my skincare included cleansing with micellar water, moisturiser followed by tinted moisturiser, translucent powder, blusher and eyeliner, which I removed daily with micellar water and also moisturised at night. I was really lucky to have clear, smooth skin that needed low coverage foundation, for example.
Since lockdown I have moisturised morning and night, still cleaning face with micellar water, and haven’t worn makeup while wfh, (believing I was giving my skin a break), but now my skin looks really bad with open pores, nasty blind blackhead-y lumps under and to the sides of my chin and on my cheeks, and a lot of tiny yellow cysts on the plumper skin beneath the eyes on the front of the cheeks.
I’m going to have to return to work soon, and don’t want to look worse than when my colleagues last saw me - do you lovely MNetters out there have any good tips for treatments to try for getting rid of open pores and blocked pores and promoting general healthy-looking skin?
Thanks in advance.

My guess is that without wearing makeup you aren’t cleansing as fully as you were before……..Try a wash off cleanser after the micellar water, (maybe the fulvic acid one from the inky list?) Maybe try a chemical exfoliator (no too often) and maybe a niacinimde serum before your moisturiser. (The ordinary have one with zinc for around £6).
You will get all sorts of recommendations on here and I’m sure loads will be great but I’m going on what you already do etc rather than a full “change your lifestyle” skincare routine.
Hope you get some improvements the biggest change I had was using spf and double cleansing it off at the end of the day.
Best of luck and remember all of your colleagues will likely be feeling insecure about going back to work after such a long time too.

Ooh that’s interesting @Kjr33, I forgot that when I moved to just moisturising, I changed to a higher spf level in the moisturiser I used because of no longer wearing tinted moisturiser with spf in it.

I’ll give the double cleansing a try while I order the products you suggested ( and thanks for recommending some that don’t break the bank, too!)

@Notjustanymum no worries

I would also recommend if you are thinking of chemical exfoliation the paulas choice aha and bha is great (you can get a mini version to try it out)
And a separate moisturiser and spf is imo better but no need to change everything all at once!

just do one or two things and give it a good month or so to see what’s working.
Hope it helps I’m dreading going back to the office too!