Now:




Then:



Also, could you please let me know the OP of this image?
Thank you!

It seems to me whatever technique you used to "smooth" the skin actually
just intensified (or sharpened) the skin texture to an extreme (without much actual correction).  This is bound to happen when bandpassing or inverted high pass techniques, etc., are used as the sole process at or near the same frequency on the entire image. 

It also intensified the specular highlights in the fly aways on the hair which you would actually want to minimize and/or remove completely. 

I would research more into dodging and burning techniques and try to not focus just on the texture of the skin but the tones, dimension/shape, lighting, etc.

I definitely agree with the reply above. I'd also add that the highlight on her nose is definitely too bright and the image looks too sharpened, so be careful with that. You should as well take into account the shading of the image as a whole, and not just remove little blemishes. Dodging and burning with a big soft brush could be a good start! I recommend searching in youtube "retouching dodge and burning" and you'll get plenty of results of different tutorials which cover high end photo retouching.

A bit of liquify will straighten out her nosetip and clean up the shape of her mouth. Almost every face is asymetrical up this close. And using clone brush in darken to remove the cross hairs will give a much smoother appearance to the hair.

if you wan to send me the file I can show you what i refer to.

Thank you, Paul Snyder!

Thank you, Agustin_0!

Thank you, Megan! I understand what you meant. I have the RAW file of that picture but don't know who the owner is.

Like cooking, I have added too many "spices" in the "dish" below and wait for your critique. Thank you!

Before:

(by Mayhem #669593)


After:

The photographer is Stefan Bourson. It was shot Chez Franck in May 2012.