Winter Skin? Keep Your Skin Glowing All Year Long

As the weather starts to change from warm, balmy nights to cool and crisp evenings in the northern hemisphere, you might notice your skin starting to change with it. 

So, your skin was healthy, glowing and behaving in all the ways it should and then all of a sudden, mayhem. Pure skin mayhem. We're talking inflammation, dryness, sudden intolerance to skincare you have been using for months without issues… with only one culprit to blame: The seasons. 

 

Sound familiar? You're not alone in that one. It's that time of year again where the weather doesn't know how it wants to behave so consequentially neither does our skin.

Summer / winter skin changes

1. Decreasing moisture levels and inflammation 

The skin thrives with consistency, so temperamental weather changes can take its toll on our skin while it struggles to keep up leading to loss of hydration and inflammation.

Then you look to the ways we try to regulate our body temperature as a consequence to the colder winter days, hot showers, heaters... all working to further acerbate drying effects to your skin. Your skin needs a little extra love and attention while it works overtime to regulate itself with the weather.

As a result, we are finding a lot of patients who were tolerating the active ingredients in their skincare are experiencing a bit of extra dryness due to the seasons changing. This moisture loss then tests the strength of your skin’s protective barrier. Otherwise known as the “Lipid Barrier”

The Lipid Barrier is made up of corneocytes (layers of dead skin cells) and lipids (the skin's natural fats). It serves other purposes we should all care about like retaining and maintaining adequate moisture levels in the skin to keep it looking radiant and healthy and protecting it from damage. You’ll know your skin isn’t quite keeping up with the seasons if you are experiencing one or more of the following: 

• Breakouts
• Rough skin texture
• Increased sensitivity 
• Dryness / tightness / flaking 
• Fine lines
• Eczema / dermatitis / rosacea / other inflammatory skin conditions
• Intolerance to active skincare

2. Decrease in Vitamin D

While the weather changes work on drawing out all the moisture from your skin, that extra cloud coverage and our indoor hibernation tendencies means there’s a high chance that we are lacking in Vitamin D. 

Vitamin D has demonstrated to help with inflammatory conditions such as psoriasis, eczema, dermatitis and rosacea, whilst also helping drier skin types. It also aids with the regulation of oil production to help the skin produce adequate amounts of oil to keep the skin nourished and balanced.

It’s also crucial for skin protecting. It helps with skin cell growth and repair, whilst also exhibiting photoprotective effects.

Bonus? It’s been demonstrated to prevent ageing skin. Skin ageing has been linked to the shortening of the caps of genetic material on the free ends of DNA strand. These caps are otherwise known as ‘telomeres’. Without delving too much into the science, the important thing to know here is that studies have proven people with the higher Vitamin D levels have significantly longer telomeres than those with lower levels. So much so, it is equivalent to about five additional years of ageing. 

So what can we do? Balance is key.... 

Your skin needs a little extra love and attention while it works overtime to regulate itself with the weather. This may mean cutting back on some of the active ingredients you are using to alternate nights or even looking into introducing a new product into your regime and making a few lifestyle changes. Here are our doctors’ recommendations to keep your skin glowing, even on the dullest of days:

Skincare tips 

• Avoid scrubs and use an enzyme exfoliator to buff away excess flaking
• Use The Secret Serum to pull essential moisture deep into the lower layers of the skin whilst simultaneously improving barrier function to support the skins healing process. 
• Decrease applications of the Cellular Repair Night Cream
• Use a lightweight oil over Day Elixir to lock in extra moisture
• Use Brightening Day Elixir to act as barrier against harsh weather conditions

 Lifestyle tips

• Invest in humidifier to maximise moisture (set at around 60%)
• Lower heater temperature and layer up to avoid drying effects
• Avoid excessively hot showers and limit to 5 – 10 minutes
• Sunscreen, every day, even the cloudy ones
• Vitamin D supplementation 
• Vitamin D rich diet (oily fish, egg yolk, some fat spreads and breakfast cereals)