12 Bad Skin Habits Your Dermatologist Wishes You’d Break

03.10.2026, 02:18 allure.com

Bad habits: We're all guilty of them—and most aren't a big deal. Who hasn’t watched hours of Friends reruns with a bag of Cape Cod chips on a sleepless night? But then there are the bad habits that can sneakily sabotage our skin, and when wrinkles are looming, things get a little more personal. There’s the stuff we do mindlessly that can lead to hair breakage (what?), well-intentioned purchases that undermine our skin care’s wrinkle-smoothing potential (why?!), and good old-fashioned forgetfulness (we swear to wear sunscreen tomorrow).

When we asked dermatologists which bad habits they most wish people would break for the sake of their skin health, some answers were not surprising (wash your face before bed, don’t pop pimples); but the advice they gave for breaking these tendencies and forming good habits instead was stuff we hadn’t been told before. They offered a wealth of simple, effective tips that might just help us crawl into bed with clean skin every night and protect it from the sun each day. (Put sunscreen next to our toothbrush? Genius! Our skin thanks you, Corey Hartman, MD!)

Each doctor interviewed mentioned that we should not be following skin-care trends blindly—our sincere apologies to the industry!—and to avoid giving up on a formula too quickly. “Skin care is a long game,” says Laurel Naversen Geraghty, MD, a board-certified dermatologist in Medford, Oregon. “It’s not how much you blast your face with new ingredients; it's the good, proven steps that you stick to over time.”

Here’s how to make that long game work in your favor—and how to recognize and quit all of the habits that might be undermining your skin along the way.

We shudder to think of candy-colored Juicy Couture tracksuits and low-rise jeans from the ’90s, but one day, we might also look back and wonder why we ever embraced slugging (remember when everyone was coating their face in petroleum jelly?) or bought so many peels. “We don’t need to be on some continual holy grail quest to find the ultimate new skin-care product,” says Dr. Geraghty, “and you shouldn’t feel like you need to throw every possible ingredient at your complexion or spend a lot of money to have healthy, glowing skin. Keep your regimen simple but consistent, relying on proven ingredients rather than trendy TikTok ones. Trends come and go, but your skin has to last you a lifetime.”

Shopping for new skin care has been a thing for as long as skin care has been a thing. But there’s a new, almost compulsive willingness to buy more, and to do so more frequently in order to keep up with what’s buzzy (exosomes! PDRN! growth factors!). “The idea [is] that looking good for our time isn’t just about things like eyebrow shape; now it's how good your skin is,” says Ava Shamban, MD, a board-certified dermatologist in Los Angeles.

The worst-case scenario is spending a lot of money on products that ultimately wreak havoc on your skin. “I have some young, female patients who tend to overdo it—they pile on multiple active ingredients or products at once, or they keep throwing new treatments at their skin, over and over,” says Dr. Geraghty. They can wind up with skin reactions like bumps, flakes, or itchy rashes, she adds, or a generally compromised, fragile skin barrier. “These conditions can take time, a dermatologist consultation, and medication to calm and reverse.”

And just because a friend or random influencer swears by a peel for achieving glass skin, that doesn’t mean it’s right for your skin, says Corey Hartman, MD, a board-certified dermatologist in Birmingham, Alabama. If you’re jumping around a lot and a product causes you to break out or makes your skin flare up, it can be “hard to tell what’s causing the problem and what’s actually helping your skin,” he explains.

Dr. Shamban agrees. She is increasingly finding herself playing detective for “young patients who are really obsessed with not getting old,” she says. They may jump on one too many trends and “come in and their skin's all on fire. I’ll ask, ‘Okay, three weeks ago, what were you doing?’”

A good rule of thumb, says Dr. Geraghty, is “don’t introduce more than one new product or ingredient at a time, or try multiple new products in any given week.”

Some trends to be especially careful with are slugging (“I see a lot of breakouts from this,” says Dr. Shamban), alpha hydroxy acids (“a double-edged sword that irritates some folks,” says Dr. Hartman), and, for the love of all that’s holy, injectable peptides. “Younger people are using a tanning one,” Dr. Shamban says, and “the risk is that you're stimulating melanocytes everywhere in the body. There are some in the central nervous system and in the internal genital—and you don't know if you're inadvertently stimulating a precancerous melanoma cell.”

But even if you’re not taxing your skin outright, you are robbing it of the chance to get all the benefits from a product if you give up on it prematurely. “People don't give their products enough time to work before they hop from one to the next,” says Dr. Hartman. If a formula contains tried-and-true ingredients and it is not irritating you, “stick with it for at least three months to really give it time to work. Be consistent.”

With peptides in moisturizers and serums, for example, “people expect so much of them, but the bottom line is that they're overpromising and underdelivering in the short period of time that people want them to work,” says Dr. Shamban. “You have to wait two or three months to really get a significant change.” Even with retinoids—a proven ingredient for smoothing lines and brightening skin—“we know from good studies that it really takes six months [to see meaningful results].”

So, instead of following fads or jumping around, “stick to what’s withstood the test of time, and to what works for your skin type,” says Dr. Geraghty. Peptides can be great for smoothing; niacinamide and vitamin C are solid brighteners; salicylic acid is known for helping to manage acne; and retinol is ideal for… well, everyone, really. “Don't give up on a proven ingredient after a few days or a week,” she adds.

When in doubt: Occam’s razor applies to skin care too. By that we mean the simplest solution is often the right one. The sun is the number one cause of skin aging, so the single best thing you can do is “protect from sunshine with sunscreen, hats, sunglasses, and clothing,” says Dr. Geraghty. And speaking of UV rays…

Indoor tanning, laying out, and getting sunburned are what Dr. Geraghty considers the worst habits for your skin. The new and, frankly, reckless anti-sunscreen movement has a lot to say about this, but the fact remains: “Ultraviolet light is a proven carcinogen. It increases the risk of skin cancer and precancers, while damaging the skin, causing dark spots, sagging, and wrinkling that can be very difficult or impossible to reverse,” Dr. Geraghty explains. “UV light raises the risk for cancer, just like smoking and asbestos raise the risk of cancer. Patients tell me they think they look better when they are tan—do they also think they look better when they smoke?”

If you’re chasing the sun for vitamin D, Dr. Geraghty suggests getting it from your diet (cheese, egg yolks, and fortified milk are all good sources) or supplements, “rather than raising the risk of cancer and sun damage.” If you simply like the way it feels to be out in the sun or in a tanning bed, she wants you to consider the fact that these habits have “been shown to be physiologically addictive, just like using opioid drugs.” Just because something makes you feel good, doesn’t mean it’s necessarily healthy. “Too much sun and any indoor tanning causes definite harm to our skin,” she says.

For Dr. Shamban’s patients who might say, “Well, I was just laying out for two hours, it's not that bad,” her response is: “It is that bad. We know that ultraviolet exposure is the number one cause of premature aging and skin cancer.” And it's not just bad for your skin, she points out, “it's bad for your internal organs because you're compromising the ability of your skin's immune function—we know that sun exposure exacerbates lupus and other autoimmune conditions."

There’s also the fact that having skin cancer removed can be more complex in some cases than others. On areas that don’t have a lot of laxity (if you pinch the nose, eyelids, and ears, for example, you’ll notice there’s not a lot of extra skin there), removing skin cancer can leave a wound that requires a skin graft (taking nearby healthy tissue) to cover it, which can leave a scar. C’mon, isn’t the prospect of a scar on your nose another good reason to reach for sunscreen daily?

The flip side of this is that simply by using sunscreen, you are doing something amazing for your skin: protecting yourself against skin cancer, wrinkles, and hyperpigmentation. There are mineral and chemical options, sheer formulas that are undetectable on skin, and sprays for quick touch-ups. It’s so much easier to put on sunscreen (with an SPF 35 or higher) than it is to use a million other skin-care products to try to reverse wrinkles and sun spots once you have them.

“Self-tanners or makeup [such as bronzers or tinted moisturizers] are safe ways to give skin a tan appearance, if that’s what you’re going for,” says Dr. Geraghty, though she’d much rather “we all love and embrace our natural skin tone, rather than trying to change it.”

You know the sun is bad for your skin. You know that sunscreen is the answer. It’s just that the mornings are so busy and you’re only outside for, like, an hour total each day, so do you really need to wear SPF all the time? The answer from dermatologists—the people who look at skin cancer and wrinkles and sun spots all day long—is yes. You get more sun than you’d think just driving around in your car, says Dr. Shamban.

To prevent premature aging, new and deepening wrinkles, hyperpigmentation, not to mention skin cancers, “we want people to wear sunscreen every day,” says Dr. Hartm