skincare

It’s really cold today! It’s been quite cold for a while now, it even snowed most of Saturday. Today the cold is tinged with wind however. I was looking forward to coming into Smith’s School of English, Kyobashi all day, actually, because of the great heating system we have here!

Although I really enjoy the cold, my skin doesn’t enjoy it as much. Especially the gusts of wind really dries it out.

Luckily, Japan is the perfect country for skincare products. The famous Japanese skincare company, Shiseido, was the first company to develop lotion, a soft moisturising lightweight liquid. This probably doesn’t much to most of the men reading this post, but to countless females it is a skinsaver in the dryer colder months. These days most skincare ranges include lotion of some kind, at least in Japan. On the other hand, men use a lot of these products now. And they should!
To quote only one example, while it was snowing hard on Saturday, one of my pink level students brought up the importance of skincare to her recently. She said that when she first came into the shop at age 23, the shop assistants basically turned her away and said she didn’t need it all, she was young and beautiful. When this student comes in these days, they tell her that there are so many products that she absolutely must buy. Something which becomes very expensive, and makes her feel that she’s gotten old. In retrospect, this initial interaction was unusually virtuous behaviour coming from a shop assistant, for when I’ve gone into any skincare shop, they’ve suggested all kinds of things to improve my skin (and it makes me think, how bad do I actually look?), and this newfound need for her skin is probably more of a sales trend than her actual needing so many products.

It was really enjoyable to have a student bring something up that she was interested in. When she talked about this subject, her English was actually much better than usual, and she used adjectives and vocabulary I’d never heard her use before, or thought she knew. So it just goes to show that when the will to communicate is there, it will find a way. And when talking about something that has piqued your interest, you might surprise yourself in how much you actually know!
Still, there is no place like Japan to find all the things your skin loves and uses to become smooth and healthy again. Japan is especially rich in all the ranges that cater for sensitive skin, or people with allergies, not to mention endemic whitening products!