Dried Out Winter Skin
Story Highlights
- Beautiful Bodies
- Quick Tips
- Why Soap Is Bad
- Exfoliate Yourselves Silly
Beautiful Bodies
Just because it’s winter and you cover your body up, it doesn’t mean you should stop cherishing the skin underneath the scarves. Just think about how much better you feel and look in the summer when you’re slapping on the sun screen, scraping it off in the shower with an exfoliant and nourishing the new skin underneath with a nice, heavy duty moisturiser. When you neglect to do this in the winter, it’s akin to letting scales grow all over your body for six months and when you combine this with your skin’s natural response to the cold, it’s going to be that much harder to get your skin in shape, come summer. With that in mind here are a few little things you can do to maintain beautiful bodies, all year round.
Quick Tips
Flaky, dry and cracked skin in the winter is caused by dehydration brought about by artificial heating drying the air around you, leeching the moisture from your body n the process. Combating this is simple. Merely turn the temperature down a notch, crack a window on occasion ‐ to let in a little moisture from outside and put a tiny bowl of water underneath the radiator that you spend most of your time around. Too much and you’ll encourage mould but just enough and the radiator will draw the water from the bowl, and not from you. Also keep yourself hydrated from the inside and it’ll shine through.
Why Soap Is Bad
In the winter months your skin is already on the war path with the environment around it and when it’s taking casualties, the worst thing you can do is use a regular soap. Normal soap strips away your skin’s naturally protective, acidic barrier which clocks in at between pH4 and pH6. Striping away your first line of defence is just foolish, so swap your soap for an acidic foaming wash with ingredients such as Saponaria and Lavender. It’s this or expose your skin to eight hours without its natural barrier. Beauty Terrorist will be test driving a range of these beauties next month, but for now check out Dermalogica’s Conditioning Body Wash.
Exfoliate Yourselves Silly
Despite having just espoused the virtues of locking in your skin’s natural goodness, there is something to be said for stripping away the dead skin cells, closest to the surface. The professional body scrubs are the best way forward for this but they’re also time consuming and expensive, so here’s how you do it at home. Begin by dry brushing the skin, from the tips of your toes – all the way up. Just like a good massage, this stimulates your lymph nodes and the flow of moisture in your body, while shedding the dead skin that’s merely hanging on. Now it’s time to hop into the shower and exfoliate with a dollop of scrub on each limb. Now rinse or take a dip in a nice bath with some essential oils in the mix. After this, all you have to do is dry off and moisturise. Doing this twice a week will leave your skin silky soft and winter will be deprived of another dull, pale and depressed automaton.
‐ Rob Savage
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