Winter can be harsh on your skin. Being covered from head to toe doesn’t give your skin much time to breathe while the cold weather can really dry your skin out. The lack of humidity in the air means your skin needs extra help to stay soft and supple and can feel rough, raw, and itchy and look red and irritated, especially on your hands, knees and elbows. Read on to learn how you can keep your skin moisturized and supple all through the year by simply incorporating a few simple skincare rules into your daily routine.
Humectants, Emollients, and Occlusives
Different skincare ingredients protect and moisturize your skin in various ways. It’s a good idea to make sure some of these are present in your skincare products to help keep your skin healthy. Broadly speaking, these are divided into:
- Humectants: What humectants do sounds like something you’d see in a science fiction movie. They essentially draw water into the skin from the atmosphere as well as deeper layers of the body to hydrate your skin. Hyaluronic acid is a humectant that has been making waves in the beauty industry for a while now for it’s ability to hold 1,000 times its weight in water. Other natural humectants include glycerine, lactic acid, and glycerol.
- Occlusives: Always use an occlusive after a humectant. Occlusives create a protective barrier on the surface of your skin to prevent moisture loss. Shea butter is a great occlusive that makes your skin feel luxuriously soft. Other natural occlusives to look out for include castor oil, squalene, and beeswax. It’s always a good idea to use occlusives on areas like your elbows, knees, heels, and hands.
- Emollients: Emollients are skincare ingredients that soothe dryness and irritation, and repair skin. They are often oil-based ingredients that help keep your skin supple. Due to this, many emollients may have humectant and occlusive properties as well. Cocoa butter, colloidal oatmeal, and squalene are all examples of natural emollients.
Skincare Tips for Dry Skin
Now that you know what types of ingredients you should have in your skincare products, here are a few tips that can help you keep the dryness to a minimum.
- Have shorter showers and baths. Bathe in warm water instead of piping hot, as hot water can dry your skin out. Pat your skin dry instead of rubbing it
- Use a gentle cleanser like the Ultra-Gentle Green Tea Cleanser from Northern Beauty that contains allantoin – a powerful emollient that calms itchy winter dryness, anti-inflammatory green tea, and oat protein and honeyquat that work as humectants and stimulate collagen production in your skin.
- Use a hydrating serum: Serums have low molecular weights, which means they penetrate your skin’s deeper layers to trap moisture inside, so your skin is hydrated from within. Northern Beauty’s Hyaluronic Acid & Niacinamide Rejuvenating Serum contains both Low Molecular Weight (LMW) Hyaluronic Acid and High Molecular Weight (HMW) HA to protect your dermis and epidermis. Niacinamide helps create a protective barrier on your skin.
- Apply moisturiser to after using your serum to seal the deal. It’s also a good idea to moisturise your body immediately after bathing, while its still damp to lock in moisture. Check out Northern Beauty’s Rosey Cheeks Daily Moisturizer that contains rose floral water to rejuvenate and hydrate skin, vitamin E to protect against UV damage, and shea butter to help you skin feel gloriously soft.
As you can see, a few simple upgrades to your daily routine can take away a lot of the suffering caused by dry skin.
Browse natural, clean, and cruelty-free skincare products specially formulated to tackle dry skin on Northern Beauty today and treat your skin to the TLC it deserves!