What is Exfoliation and is it necessary to exfoliate?

I have been taught that to have beautiful skin, I need wash, tone and moisturize my face twice a day (once in the morning and once at night before I sleep). There are more to the beauty routine than this and one important step is exfoliation.

What is Skin Exfoliation?
It is basically the removal of dry and flaky surface skin.

When to Exfoliate? 
I exfoliate when my face feels rough and when I noticed that my pores are clogged. However, do note that you should not do that more than once a week. If your face becomes red and feels irritated, you have exfoliated too much.

Why Exfoliate? 
It feels good (the skin feels smooth and clean) and it resolves the following skin issues:

• Blemished Skin
• Remove dry skin which build up acts as barriers to trap oil in the skin and causes possible breakouts
• Acne scars
• Remove the skin on the dark marks and encourage the formation of new healthy skin
• Clogged Pores
• Remove dry skin, blackheads, whiteheads and little clogged bumps on the skin, usually of foreheads.
• Hyper pigmentation
• Breakup pigmented cells and help in the fading process
• Dry Skin
• Remove dry skin so that moisturizers can be more effective 
• Rough Skin
• Remove dry skin to make the skin smoother

A good analogy for exfoliation would be super-cleaning up your skin once in a while (once a week/month) to remove dry skin, whiteheads and blackheads which cannot be removed by just washing your face. Make exfoliation a part of your weekly or monthly beauty routine today!

Personal updates on August 18, 2013: 

I have been using my Thomas Roth Clinical Peel religiously every week for more than 1 month now and I must say that I have less clogged pores, my skin is definitely much smoother and my acne scars less prevalent. I also seem to have less of those huge breakouts! Exfoliating weekly is definitely paying off!

Personal updates on Sep 26, 2014: 

Read online about home-made scrubs and found one really simple one - Honey and Brown Sugar Scrub. It works really well and it is preservative free and really cheap.