How To Prepare Your Skin For The Cold Weather

As the cold weather starts to creep in, maybe you’ve already begun spending more time indoors and clicking the switch on a little evening heating. But while it’s a way to keep things warm and cosy, the combination of cold air outdoors and dry atmosphere indoors can play havoc with your skin, making it feel tight and uncomfortable. At SL Towers, we support simplified skincare and that means making the most of products we already have across the whole year, even as the seasons change. While our skin demands a lot more support in autumn/winter, there are ways you can adapt your summer skincare routine to make it work across the colder months – we’re about to share how.

The big chill

As summer swings into autumn and cold weather becomes more common, humidity levels fall and the sebaceous (oil) glands in our skin also become more lethargic, leading to our skin feeling dehydrated. Add central heating to the mix and it’s no wonder even normal skin can start to feel sensitive and potentially flare into dry patches of eczema and dermatitis.

Preparation and prevention

We’ve split the key ways you can support your best skin health into things you can do and things you might want to avoid over this period.

Things to do

• Make more of your face oil – add a few drops of face oil to your moisturiser or cleanser to seal in hydration and soften skin.

• Stay hydrated – that doesn’t mean you only have to drink water. Herbal teas and soups count towards your hydration too and help you to keep up your nutrition.

• UV rays don’t hibernate over the winter. While we may not experience full sun every day, the danger of UV rays still remains, so keep topping up your SPF cream to protect yourself from skin damage.

• Spend at least 5-minutes each day massaging your skin to boost circulation and bring the blood and nutrients to the surface of your skin. If 5-minutes feels too much, start small with a couple of minutes or until your face oil has absorbed into your skin. Using a Gua sha tool reduces the amount of time needed to massage skin.

• There’s nothing wrong with investing in a new skincare product if you feel it’s necessary. If you’re interested in bumping up your cold-weather skincare, try a product that includes hyaluronic acid and alpha hydroxy acids, which will help to protect your skin against dryness.

• Licking your lips – while it is tempting to manage dry spots by licking your lips, doing so will only make them drier and cause cracks. Prevent sore and chapped lips by using lip products that contain hydrating and repairing waxes and oils that last at least a few hours.

• Staying indoors – we’re not meant to sit indoors all day. As well as revitalising the appearance of dull skin, studies show that walking in nature can reduce stress levels, which has a knock-on effect on our skin health. We also need to make more effort to top up our vitamin D levels in the colder period. While it may be enough for some people to gain enough vitamin D from venturing outside, it may be necessary to add a supplement to your daily routine, especially if you have a greater level of melanin in your skin.

• Scalding showers – while it’s tempting to heat yourself up in the shower on a cold day, too much heat can dry your skin. That’s because excess heat, held in your skin after you shower, will evaporate the water from your moisturiser, leading to dryness and the need to reapply more often.

Support your best skin health

While it takes a little more work to support healthy skin during the autumn and winter seasons, there are things you can do to prepare for the colder weather. From staying hydrated to adding a few drops of face oil to your daily routine, supporting your best skin health is about maintaining healthy habits and also adapting your skincare routine so that your skin benefits from what it needs most.

^Sources

^{https://www.vogue.co.uk/beauty/article/expert-facialists-winter-secrets}