How to Beat the Winter Skin Blahs

If you live in a cold climate, the winter weather and indoor dryness can be brutal on skin—dulling, drying, chapping, flaking, redness, irritation—blah, blah, blah. With a little strategy and a good winter skin care routine, you can ditch the blahs and return to bloom. Here are tips to get you there.

Optimize for Winter

Adding a moisturizer is probably the first thing that comes to mind to alleviate dry winter skin, but replenishing the moisture that dry heat and wind strip away is only part of your mission. To make sure skin retains that moisture, strengthening your skin barrier is priority one.

Ingredients like ceramide-boosting niacinamide, nourishing fatty acids including rose hip oil and grape seed oil, soothing oat extracts, anti-inflammatory green tea extract and witch hazel, and redness-reducing, skin plumping peptides are among the skin soothers you should be reaching for this winter. Vivant’s Cleansing Milk, Skin Nourishing Toner, Rejuv Rx Peptide Concentrate, and Allantoin Sedating & Hydrating Lotion are great additions to your winter skin care regimen for a resilient skin barrier.

Improve Air Quality

Air that is too dry will continue to remove the moisture from your skin as fast as you can add it. Running a humidifier in your home and office, if possible, can help restore a healthy moisture balance to your skin.

Watch Shower/Bath Temperature

In winter, you may be tempted to increase the water temperature of your showers and baths to help you warm up, but very hot water breaks down the lipid barriers in your skin, which can remove moisture instead of adding it. Turn down the tap and watch the clock. A shorter shower or bath with warm, rather than hot, water is much healthier for the skin's moisture level than a long, hot soak.

Keep Exfoliating

You might be tempted to stop exfoliating when your skin seems dry, but moisturizing and skin optimizing ingredients can’t penetrate through layers of dead skin. Chemical and physical exfoliation is just as important in winter, if not more so.

For particularly rough patches of skin like on the heels and elbows, Vivant’s Clear Body Therapy is the perfect marriage of exfoliation and hydration with its blend of vitamin A, lactic acid, and grape seed oil. Use it to slough off rough, cracked areas and reveal soft, smooth, supple skin.

Stay Dry

Wet gloves and socks may irritate skin and make it itchy, or even trigger an eczema flare-up. Replace moisture with Allantoin Sedating & Hydrating Lotion. If you need to wash your hands often during the day, try using Vivant’s Cleansing Milk as a hand soap to avoid stripping moisture from the skin with harsh hand soaps.

Dry skin treatment is more than just finding the right moisturizer for winter. Vivant’s skin hydrating and protection products are a clinic in how to treat dry skin and more. Browse the collection to find the perfect products that will keep your skin feeling fresh and beautiful during the colder months, and year round.