Winter Skin Care

On this official first day of winter, I’m going to tell you how to help prevent getting dry winter skin and itchy winter skin. It’s going to require a few changes in your daily skin care routines but that’s really easy. First of all, take shorter showers and, very important, the water can be warm but make sure it’s not hot because hot water over-dries your skin. Use less soap, use a less drying soap, and while you certainly want to use soap every day on your hands and on your face and in your personal areas, you don’t need to use it every day on the other parts of your body because, when they sweat, all they do is make water and salt, and that just flows off in the course of water during your bathing.

Moisturize, moisturize—very, very important, especially as soon as you come out of that bath or shower because, during bathing, your skin absorbs a certain amount of moisture and the moisturizer will lock it in and make it last longer. Make sure you re-apply your moisturizer frequently and use a richer moisturizer during the winter than you do during the summer. And most importantly, you need to change all of your skin care products to either richer, more moisturizing, or more emollient products. So with cleansers, cleansers that remove less oil, with toners, toners that don’t have alcohol, and with your sunscreen, your antioxidant, your exfoliant, again just more emollient creams or lotions. And as long as we’re talking about sunscreen, remember, during the winter, the damaging UVA rays of the sun are just as strong as they are as during the summer, so make sure your sunscreen is labeled with either UVA protection or broad-spectrum protection.