Winter routine can give your skin a boost

Cold weather, short days and heated homes and offices spell dry, lifeless skin — the winter blahs.

For bright, fresh skin during this long season, you need to change your skin-care routine when you change your wardrobe.

First, let’s discuss why your skin changes as soon as the cold arrives. Cold air retains less moisture. The combination of lower humidity and dry indoor heat sucks the life out of skin, leaving you with a dull complexion. Human skin has a protective outer layer of keratinized cells and oils meant to retain moisture and keep the external environment out. But it is not enough of a barrier to fend off this assault.

Less moisture-retaining oil is produced in cold weather. The layer of dead cells on the surface thickens, dries and flakes, and you can feel the damage. That’s the dry, blotchy, itchy skin of northern winters.

The good news is this is a surface problem, and dealing with it by exfoliation removes the dead cells, allowing you to protect and nourish the skin.

With a little self-help, and perhaps a professional treatment or two, you can smile your way through the winter blahs.

The first step is exfoliation. Shedding the thickened, flaky layer of dead cells allows for a thinner layer of younger hydrated cells to take its place.

Skin peels are exfoliants, which are meant to remove the superficial dead cells. At-home exfoliants come in the form of lotions or masks. The active ingredients are alpha hydroxy acids, or AHAs. The most effective forms of these are glycolic acid from sugar and lactic acid from milk.

The AHA concentration of over-the-counter products is safe enough for regular use. Exfoliating masks have a higher concentration of AHAs, and weekly use is sufficient.

If you have access to a good skin-care clinic, jump-start the process with a professional peel. We often combine the peel with dermaplaning, for physical removal of dead cells.

Now your skin is ready to be moisturized. This is the key step — replacing natural moisturetrapping skin oils. We produce this by applying moisturizer to water-moistened skin, trapping it and forcing the moisture into the keratinized cells. This plumps up the cells and makes skin radiant.

Even the best moisturizers last no more than 12 hours, so the applications are done twice daily.

Some moisturizers contain additional ingredients like vitamin E, green tea or other antioxidants. They are micro-doses, so don’t count on side benefits. The only truly therapeutic additive is sunscreen. A morning moisturizer with SPF 30 is a good idea. Even winter sun does damage.

Moisturizers simply help skin retain moisture, and in cold, dry weather, that can help a lot.