How to Make Your Skin Smoother: 9 Effective Tips

Experimenting with the latest makeup trends can be a fun way to bring out your eyes or highlight your cheekbones. But beneath the gloss and contouring, soft, smooth skin will always be your best feature.

For those of you plagued with rough, bumpy skin, it may seem like getting smoother skin is as impossible as changing your eye color. But that's just not true. While different factors such as aging, sun damage, or an ineffective beauty routine can all have an adverse effect on your skin, everyone can achieve smoother skin with the right approach.

Want to know how to make your skin smoother? Keep reading to find out our top tips.

1. Hydrate Skin From Within

As well as flushing out toxins, drinking plenty of water hydrates and plumps out skin cells from within. Water helps power renewal processes and other metabolic functions, enabling your body to work better. This then shows on your face with smoother skin and a glowing complexion.

2. Prioritize Beauty Sleep

Wondering how to make your skin softer overnight? Make sure to get plenty of sleep!

The stresses of modern life can take their toll on your skin. Without enough sleep, your body doesn't have enough time to rest, recover, and repair itself. As a result, you're more likely to see sallow, rough, dry skin staring back at you in the mirror.

Luckily, you can turn your skin around by clocking in a regular seven to eight hours of quality sleep each night. As well as helping your body and mind relax and recover, making beauty sleep a priority will leave your skin smoother and more radiant in no time.

3. Cleanse and Cleanse Again

Before you go to bed you'll need to double cleanse to make sure you've removed all the makeup, sunscreen, grime, and other debris we expose our skin to every day.

Without this pore-clogging dirt, it'll be much easier to reveal smooth skin. What's more, cleansing skin balances your skin's pH level to help it retain water and skincare products for a smoother, plumper complexion.

An oil-based cleanser works best as a first step for makeup removal. After removing this with a muslin cloth, use a milk or gel cleanser then wash your face with lukewarm water and pat with a soft, clean towel.

4. Ease Into Exfoliation

Along with cleansing, regular exfoliation helps remove the dead skin cells lurking on our skin to reveal the younger, smoother cells beneath. But, while dry-brushing the skin on our bodies before showering can help reveal this smoother skin, our faces need a gentler form of exfoliation.

This exfoliation comes in the form of acids, which are also called chemical exfoliators. Acids break down the glue holding the dead skin cells on our faces and are less harsh than physical exfoliators like scrubs.

These acids include both AHAs (alpha hydroxy acids) and BHA (beta hydroxy acids). The AHA lactic acid is best for sensitive skin while the BHA salicylic acid works well on oily and spot-prone skin types.

5. Layer Moisturizing Products

Buying the best skincare products can help make your skin smoother. But you'll need to learn how and when to apply them for the best results.

For example, moisturizers are often too thick to penetrate the skin and end up sitting on top. To avoid this, always make sure to apply your products from the thinnest to the thickest consistency for optimal skin smoothness.

After cleansing, use an essence to improve your skin's absorption properties. Follow this with a serum containing hyaluronic acid then apply a moisturizer to lock this hydration in place for smooth-looking skin that glows with health and radiance.

6. Focus on Facial Massage

Using facial massage techniques on a regular basis can increase blood and oxygen flow for improved circulation and healing. This can help reveal smoother skin and a more youthful glow, as well as skin that's more receptive to the products you apply.

To enjoy these benefits, apply a little oil to cleansed skin and use soft, gentle strokes out from your nose along the tops of your cheeks and down the sides of your face and neck. A gua sha or facial roller can help too, but you'll need to make sure you use these massage tools correctly to enjoy their skin-smoothing benefits.

7. Reach for Retinol

Another key ingredient in your beauty routine for optimal skin smoothness is retinol, a derivative of vitamin A.

As an antioxidant and anti-aging powerhouse, retinol helps to neutralize the free radicals that can destroy healthy skin cells while also encouraging cell renewal and collagen production. The result is an improved face texture with fewer fine lines, less hyperpigmentation, and a brighter, smoother appearance.

Retinol's anti-aging properties also work to prevent future signs of aging by strengthening your skin barrier, as well as fighting adult acne, brightening dark circles, and preventing the loss of collagen. So, no matter how old you are, it's never too early to start using retinol for smooth skin now and in the future.

8. Be Proactive About Protection

You might know that sunscreen helps prevent skin cancer, but did you know that protected skin is also smoother skin?

For young and healthy-looking skin, it's vital to apply broad-spectrum SPF 50 every day after your usual serums and moisturizers. This final layer of skincare will help protect your skin from the sun's harmful rays while helping to prevent the dry, rough skin that comes from too much sun exposure.

9. Get a Professional Boost

There's no doubt that a healthy lifestyle and good skin care practices can help you achieve softer, smoother skin. But for fast and effective results, nothing beats professional beauty treatments like skin resurfacing or a chemical peel.

Skin resurfacing uses concentrated beams of light to improve the tone and texture of areas of damaged skin. What's more, regular treatments can help encourage collagen production for plumper, softer skin.

While a chemical peel is also a skin-resurfacing procedure, it works like a form of intense exfoliation using a chemical solution. These chemicals react with the outer layer of skin to remove dead skin cells and reveal the softer, improved skin beneath.