Hydrate your skin in the winter months

The sun can be a danger to our skin for sure, but the cold winter air isn’t helping it either. Cracked lips, itchy legs, fry patches on your face. However, there are some things you can do to hydrate and protect your skin in the winter months and here are they!

The difference between oil and water

Your skin can need hydration, but it can also lack oils. There are a few skin types: oily, dry, normal and combination skin. This is based on the amount and placement of oils in your skin, it says nothing about the amount of water. An oily skin can still lack water and a dry skin can be hydrated enough.

It’s hard to know what’s up with your skin, but a good rule is to assume your skin can always needs more hydration (water), whereas you can feel and see whether your skin needs more oils. So, feel and look at your face. Where does it feel oily, where does is shine? There is an oily place, most likely your forehead or nose. Are there places where your skin itches sometimes or feels tight? That’s likely dry skin, mostly on the neck or the cheeks. If you have a little bit of both, you likely have combination skin, if you have no such things, you’re likely to have a normal, or at least a well-balanced skin.

Dry skin types can be often affected more by winter, whereas oils types act up more in warm weather. That’s why we’ll focus more on dry skin types today. However, oily skin types still need hydration, so don’t stop reading if that’s you! Due to pollution, sun and more factors, the skin can lose water quickly and unfortunately, just drinking an extra glass a day won’t help you. However, a good skincare routine will help you out!

So now you hopefully know a little more about your own skin type, but what products can help you? For every skin type, I recommend using a cleanser, toner and a cream.

Cleansers

When you have a dry skin, you might want to be careful with the first step. Many cleaners are pretty heavy on the skin and way too stripping. Therefore, I recommend a softer cleaner without alcohol or too much perfume. People often think that you shouldn’t cleanse when you have a dry skin, because it feels tight afterwards, but nothing is less true. Although you should choose a gentle one, cleansing is an important step. It’ll get all the dirt off your skin, so the next steps can get into the skin deeper and work much better. Therefore, you should never skip it. I love the ‘Yes to Aloe Vera micellar water’ to remove make-up and The Body Shop Himalayan Charcoals cleanser.

With an oilier skin, you might prefer something to remove oils a little bit more. However, since alcohol removes water in your skin as well, I’dd still recommend the products mentioned above. However, you might want to do a deep cleanse once a week to remove extra oils, like the deep cleanser from Formula 10.0.6.

Toner

Toner is an important step in a good skincare routine, but a less intense one for hydration. Of course, there are extra hydrating ones on the market like the Rose toner from The Body Shop (which I love) or oil-balancing ones like the Seaweed toner from The Body Shop, but they won’t fix all your problems or make them much worse. However, toners do prepare your skin for the next step, so don’t skip it! Just see it as an opportunity to give your skin something extra.

Creamy

The next step is the most obvious one when it comes to hydration. This is also the step where the difference between dry and dehydrated comes in the most. We’re going to talk about creams.

There are day creams and night creams. Day creams mainly focus on protecting the skin, whereas night creams repair the skin when you’re sleeping. Because of the nourishment that’s supposed to be in night creams and since they don’t have to get into the skin as quickly, they tend to be a little thicker than day creams.

However, what that nourishment entails differs per cream. When you have dry skin, I can recommend thicker, creamier creams. These provide some oils to protect the skin better. This also works this way on the rest of the body: if your skin is very dry, you’re better off with a body butter than a body lotion. When your skin is not that dry, a gel cream is preferable, since they don’t add oils to the skin, but they do add hydration. For the body, body lotions (preferably gel lotions) and body yoghurts are great for hydration, but also aloe vera gel is a great hydrant.

There are some ingredients that can help you with extra hydration, like hyaluronic acid and Vitamin C. Although you should always check how much of something you should use and what you can combine, they are safe ingredients and used in many skincare products. For instance, The Body Shop has a Vitamin C line and a Vitamin E line with hyaluronic acid and The Ordinary is well-known for their hyaluronic acid serum. Also aloe vera, hemp and rose petals have been known to be great for hydration. Therefore, these are all things that are great in creams, since they do need some time to sink into the skin.

Extra’s

Next to this basic routine, you can give your skin some extra love every once in a while. Next to cleansing, scrubbing your body and face once or twice a week is good to get rid of dead skin cells. This also has the purpose to get the creams closer to the skin when slapping it on.

You can also throw in a face mask once or twice a week. These can be nourishing or hydrating, just look for the ingredients mentioned under the section of creams. Masks can also be cleansing, but they can be a little too intense for dry skin. When you are looking for a cleansing mask, just make sure there are little alcohols or perfumes in it. I can personally recommend clay masks, since they cleanse very well, but generally don’t dry out that much.

Serums are also great to add some hydration to your routine. As mentioned before, the hyaluronic acid serum from The Ordinary is a great solution. For dry skin, some skin oils are also great, for instance with argan oil.

Beyond the face

Although this post has focused mainly on the face, hands and lips also tend to dry out a lot. Here are some additional tips to hydrate the rest of your skin in the winter.

Many people tend to use vaseline on the lips or Labello containing vaseline. Although this does work well short-term, they tend to dry out the lips more long-term. Therefore, I recommend using sticks without vaseline in it, like the Hemp or Vitamin E lip care from The Body Shop or many lip oils. You can also use lip scrubs to smoothen them out before using a treatment. Just make sure you know in advance whether they are eatable or not.

Hand care also means protecting them beforehand. So, make sure you use hand soap for sensitive skin. These don’t clean less, but they don’t dry your hands out as much. I also recommend using a hand cream at least at the start of every day and before going to bed. This’ll protect your hands and repair them during the night. I know this isn’t very original, but again the Hemp hand cream of The Body Shop is the best one I ever found. Although I don’t love the smell, it works way better than any other.

I hope this post will help you take care of your skin this winter! What are your favourite winter products to hydrate your skin? Let me know in the comments below! Also, if you liked this and want to get more regular updates, subscribe and get a free e-book on saving money or follow me on my Instagram, Pinterest or Twitter!

Lots of love,

Lisa

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