With winter, comes dryness, so curl-up and see Lowen’s best Winter Skincare Tips.  Extremes of temperature as we venture outside puts our skin through its paces.  Combine that with the fact that our cold, winter air is a greedy bugger, trying to strip your skin of moisture.

Heels crack, lips chap, cuticles bleed and our skin is in a general state of unhappiness. Good news is we have regulating mechanisms built in to try and prevent this from happening.  I’m talking about our sebaceous glands.  Let’s learn about these often villainized citizens of your corpus:

Sebaceous glands release sebum into the hair follicle that migrates to the skin’s surface.  Their activity is really sensitive to hormonal changes (androgens, corticosteroids, substance P, cytokines, etc.) as well as external pressures (like the weather).

Sebum.  Seems like an ugly word.  It is an important component of the skin as it helps create a protective layer that helps our skin resist dehydration and is important in establishing the pH of the skin surface – which is slightly acidic.  Acidity is good in this case as a lower pH discourages infection (bacteria and viruses) and this “acid mantle” (AKA barrier) helps protect us.

Things can go wrong.

Follicles can get plugged, oil can be over produced, hormones go wonky.  Combine these and you get problems (blackheads, whiteheads, nodules, etc…)

You Need Some Good Winter Skincare Tips!

How to prevent things from going wrong?

1. Stay hydrated – inside and out.
2. First, gently wash your face with a mild cleanser that cleans vs strips your skin. What’s in your cleanser may also be a problem. A notorious baddy is sodium laurel sulfate (SLS). In our opinion, it not only strips your skin of inherent goodness. It also is wildly known to be a skin irritant. Forget the fact it won’t help that acne problem either. Instead, we recommend You sure Clean Up Nice! Face and Body Wash. Because we make it, it’s gentle enough to bathe our babies with, yet powerful enough to wash off stubborn makeup… So, it’s just awesome. As well, watch your water temperature. Hotter the water, harsher the washing can be on your skin- no matter the cleanser.
3. After you wash your face, you likely washed away all of that that sebum. However, that’s a good thing as it was likely a little old and a little dirty.  Thing is, now that it is gone. It needs to be replaced and your body doesn’t work that fast.  So you need to moisturize.  So, choose one that contains simple ingredients and penetrates your skin.  Also, avoid mineral oil and petroleum based moisturizers as they just sit on the skin. Here again our Rub it in Why Don’t Ya! Hand and Body Lotion is a skincare staple.   The fact that we use locally sourced, unrefined, fair trade ingredients means… Rub it in Why Don’t Ya! is EWG Verified™ safe and abundant in essential fatty acids that act to decrease inflammation. Hard to find a more value-packed product on the market.

Finally, stay warm friends and take care of your skin! Thanks for reading our Winter Skincare Tips 🙂

Chad Zelensky, CEO & Creative Mastermind @ Lowen’s