Skin Care Routine for Men: What Esthetician Deisy Suarez Told Mike

You shave, you wash your face with whatever soap is in the shower, and that has been your skin care routine for thirty years. Then one morning the neck in the mirror looks older than the face above it. A skin care routine for men does not have to mean a shelf of jars. It has to mean a few habits done every day, and most men past 40 were never told which ones.

Mike Torchia put the question to Deisy Suarez on episode 31 of Live Well and Thrive. She came to New York from the Dominican Republic in 1987 as a girl, fought her first winter’s dry, peeling skin with sugar and oil from her mother’s kitchen, and built that into a career as an esthetician. At the time of recording she ran three spas and was opening a fourth, in downtown Los Angeles.

What follows is what she and Mike said about daily care, in their words. It is their practice and their opinion. For anything that looks wrong, a dermatologist is the right call.

A skin care routine for men starts with the water temperature

The first change costs nothing. Years ago Mike trained a doctor who runs his own skin clinic, along with the doctor’s family. The doctor looked at Mike’s skin, said it was good, and told him how to keep it from aging fast.

Do not take hot baths. Do not take hot showers.

Lukewarm was fine. Cool was better. And the face, the doctor said, should always be washed with cool water. Mike kept his Epsom salt baths after hard workouts, because the warm water helps the tightness, but he stopped making them hot.

Deisy agreed on cool water for the face and added a distinction. Heat, the kind you get in a sauna or a steam room, has its uses for the rest of the body, she said, but it is not what helps the skin on your face. So is hot water bad for your skin? In this episode, two people who spend their days thinking about it both said to turn the dial down.

That is where a men’s skin care routine begins: before any product, with the shower you already take.

Eighty percent of good skin happens at home

Mike asked the question every man thinks when a spa comes up: what good is a facial once a month if nothing happens the rest of the time? Deisy answered with the same rule Mike applies to the gym and the kitchen. Her share of a client’s results is about 20 percent, she said. The other 80 percent is what you do at home.

Everything is cumulative, in her view. The more often you do the basics, the more you train the skin, the same way training trains a muscle. She has built her own life around routines that do not cost much, so that by the age when people start booking harsh peels and lasers, you do not need them.

She also drew her own line on what an esthetician does. Lasers belong to doctors and nurses, she said, and her spas send that work out. When a client has psoriasis or eczema, which she has seen in her own family, she gives them a routine for home and sends them to an allergist, because a flare can be triggered by food or by something outside the body. Her warning is one most men need.

You might be using things that you think are helping you, and it might just be what’s really causing the problem.

The new aftershave, the soap, the cream someone recommended: any of them can be the trigger. An esthetician can build your daily routine. A physician handles anything medical.

Daily sunscreen belongs on your neck, not just your face

Deisy listed her own regimen without hesitating. She does not leave the house before she has put lotion on her entire body. She exfoliates. She uses an eye cream. And she wears sunscreen every day.

SPF is a big one.

Her reason is what the sun does over decades. UV breaks down collagen and elastin, in her account, the structural fibers that keep skin firm, and once they break down, the skin collapses into wrinkles earlier than it should. The same exposure drives hyperpigmentation, the dark patches she called hard and expensive to fix. That is sun damage on skin as she sees it in her chair.

Then she named where men stop. People treat skin care as face up, she said, and leave everything below the jaw to the weather. She sees the result in hands, legs, and especially necks. Her instruction to clients is specific: carry your face routine down to your chest, and put SPF on all of it.

She compared skin to a plant. Stop watering it and it cracks and breaks down. If you want to know how to prevent wrinkles, and neck wrinkles in particular, her answer is not a treatment. It is moisture and daily sunscreen on the neck, every morning, the same as the face, for years. That is the plain version of a skin care routine for aging skin.

Mike’s own routine since 2003: pure aloe vera, every night

Mike’s routine is shorter than Deisy’s, and it has a story behind it. In 2003 he had just bought a Harley-Davidson chopper with a long front fork. A driver pulled out and T-boned him, and he went over the front of the bike face first onto the concrete. He woke up in an ambulance in a neck brace on the way to UCLA, where a nurse rated his face minus five on a scale of one to ten.

For months after, the bodybuilder who had always been proud of how he looked would not go out without a baseball cap. A doctor put him on special creams and laser treatments, and slowly the skin grew back. Mike credits that treatment for the healing. What he has done every day since is the habit he swears by: pure aloe vera from the plant, squeezed out, massaged into his face and neck, and left on overnight.

Before I go to bed every single night, I’ve been doing that since 2003.

When Mike asked Deisy about pure aloe vera gel for the face, she called it anti-inflammatory, soothing, and cooling. Early in her career in New York she kept cut aloe leaves in her refrigerator and applied them after waxing clients. Neither of them claimed it fixes scars. It is a cheap, simple step, and Mike has not missed it in more than twenty years.

What you eat and take shows up on your skin

Deisy treats skin as an organ, the largest one, and she says it gets fed from the inside as well as the outside. Pollution, junk food, and UV all add damage, in her view, which is why she wants antioxidants coming in from both directions.

Mike asked which vitamins she would suggest for skin. She named three: vitamin A, vitamin E, which she said helps the skin heal after surgery or breakouts, and vitamin C, as an antioxidant. Her point was not a stack. You eat for it, you apply it, and you keep the diet right, all three together. If you are deciding whether to add a supplement, read our post on how many supplements is too many first, and bring the question to your physician.

Mike’s version of the same idea is a rule he has lived by for years.

Whatever you put in your body must add value.

He said that once he made it his mantra, he saw the change in his skin, in how he woke up, and in how he slept. If you want the food side worked out properly, our conversation with a sports nutritionist covers how a professional builds it.

How this fits the way Operation Fitness works

Mike told Deisy that skin care works like training: you do it every day, not once a month. Operation Fitness is built on the same idea. A program designed by Mike and delivered by his team is tested, not guessed. It starts with your physician and your blood work, then builds training, food, sleep, and recovery around what the tests show. A skin care routine for men is one more place where those daily habits show up in the mirror. The programs page shows how the pieces fit together.

Where to go from here

Watch the full episode with Deisy Suarez on YouTube. See how training, food, and recovery are combined on the programs page. If you are past 40 and want a plan for the whole body, book a consultation and start with an honest look at where you are.