They say you don’t truly understand something until you’ve experienced it yourself, and that’s certainly been true for me. After spending nearly a decade writing about beauty, I have only recently come to know how challenging it can be to find beauty products that won’t irritate sensitive skin.
Earlier this summer, I found myself facing eczema for the first time in my life. I suddenly had raised, rough patches on my cheeks and eyelids, and these never-ending flaky patches around my forehead that my dermatologist recently diagnosed as seborrheic dermatitis. Fun.
I went from using a varied regimen of serums and creams to a very pared down routine that’s so bland it blends into my white medicine cabinet. The same goes for my hair products and makeup, which is what we’re going to dive into now.
In the throes of another flare up, I had the chance to speak with Allan Avendaño, who is a celebrity makeup artist to Addison Rae, Vanessa Hudgens and Sarah Hyland among others. Though I’ve long admired his work on Instagram, I was especially excited to talk to Allan because he is also intimately familiar with the difficulties of navigating the beauty aisles with a skin condition; he’s had plaque psoriasis, which is a chronic autoimmune disease that appears on the surface of the skin as raised, red, itchy patches, since he was a kid.
