How to Keep Your Skin Hydrated and Healthy This Winter

As the weather gets colder, you may notice your skin getting more and more dry. Sometimes you’ll notice this as just a tight feeling, but if it is more pronounced, you might feel itchy or have dry flaky skin. This could be on the face or the body, but either way, you’re going to need some extra moisture to get it feeling normal. There are other things you can do besides moisturize, and they do help, but if you’re at the point where you are noticing the dry skin, they might not help enough, or fast enough. They are still good practices, and the most simple are:

• Hydrate from within. You already know you need to drink plenty of water during the day, but when the weather is cold, it isn’t quite as easy. While a hot cup of coffee or cocoa help warm you up, they do not hydrate as effectively as plain water. So have your hot beverages, but drink more water as well.
• Do not strip natural moisture from the skin. If you take hot showers, turn the heat down a little. If you are plagued with oily skin during the summer, drop anything that strips oil from your skin, like alcohol-based products and harsh, foaming cleansers and physical exfoliators.
• "Moisturize" your home. A humidifier can help keep the air around you moist, so that it doesn’t pull moisture from your skin. Once you have started new habits that help your skin stay hydrated, then you can move to the exterior.

Moisturize your face

Even though you probably moisturize your face all year-round, you may need to increase the intensity of your moisturizer in the winter. Look for ingredients like hyaluronic acid, squalane, shea butter, vitamin E (to reduce irritation) and vitamin C (to minimize damage). We think you’ll love our Sheer Genius SPF 50 Mineral Sunscreen + Moisture, in either untinted or Universal Tint version. Nobody’s Perfect Daily Face Oil is another great product that can be used on the face, hands, body and even hair, to keep dryness at bay.

Moisturize your hands

Colder weather and hand-washing combine to require seemingly endless hand lotion applications. Make sure that you are nourishing your skin by looking for ingredients like shea butter, vitamin E, ceramides and natural oils. If you aren’t concerned with animal by-product ingredients, lanolin and bees wax help seal in moisture. If cracking is a problem, look for a product that uses colloidal oatmeal to help calm the skin.

Moisturize your body

If you normally use a lightweight lotion to moisturize your body, you might want to consider going heavier in the winter, with more of a cream or body butter. Oils that absorb quickly are also a great option for winter. Look for ingredients like those mentioned above for hands and face. Timing is more important during the winter, with the very best time to moisturize being immediately after a bath or shower. And remember to keep showers shorter and cooler. As nice as it would feel to soak in a hot tub of water, or languish in a steamy shower, those will only serve to dry your skin more once you are out of the water. We love our Bounce Butter SPF 30 Moisturizing Mousse for the Body for year-round body moisture. Even though you probably don’t need the sunscreen on your legs during winter, zinc oxide is also very soothing to dry itchy skin, and the emollient-heavy formula will definitely help keep your skin comfortable.

Moisturize your lips

No one enjoys chapped lips…they are uncomfortable and don’t look great, but every winter, there they are, back again. Preventing chapped lips takes 2-3 steps, but ultimately is worth the effort. The first thing to do is to exfoliate your lips. Keeping the layer of dead skin cells away is important not only from an appearance standpoint, but that layer is the major thing that stops lip balms and moisturizers from being able to do their job. They can’t absorb through a layer of dead skin cells, so getting rid of that layer is time well spent. The easiest way to exfoliate lips is to keep a small container of olive or coconut oil in your bathroom along with our Pout Prep Tool. Apply a tiny amount of the oil to your lips, then massage them with the small, brush-like side of the tool. This will remove the dry skin so that your lips can absorb whatever you apply next.

A good lip moisturizer should include natural oils and vitamin e. The ingredients should both hydrate and lock in moisture, which is where oils excel. Believe it or not, sun protection is also important in the winter, because on a clear, cold day there is more than enough UV present to damage lips, which have skin that is about 8 times thinner than anywhere else on the body. We think you might just love our Sun Shine SPF 30 Protective Lip Oil, which features natural oils (argan, castor, sunflower), vitamin E, mineral sun actives to gently protect from the sun, and a color—making it a triple-threat!

This winter, try keeping your skin moisturized from the inside AND the outside, to keep it comfortable until spring arrives!