Face Facts: Winter-proofing your skin

As we head into the cooler months, now is the perfect time to focus on enhancing your skin’s health. To help us navigate our winter-skin woes, we turned to Greta Ryan, Founder and Managing Director of Skin Ritual, for her expert advice.

Winter is approaching – cue ski trips, cozy winter nights, and...dry, dehydrated skin. I personally love winter, but it’s not a particularly skin-friendly season – so, let’s talk about how you can look after your skin, and keep it glowing and hydrated, all winter long.

Our skin is highly responsive to environmental changes, particularly humidity and temperature, so there can be marked differences in how it behaves and what it needs from season to season.

In winter, two key things typically happen to our skin:

1. Oil production reduces due to the drop in temperature (hello dry skin, sensitivity, eczema and dermatitis flare-ups).
2. We lose more water through our skin due to the drop in humidity, resulting in dehydration. (This process is also known as TEWL or trans-epidermal water loss).

Both of the above typically lead to dryness, dehydration, sensitivity, and skin barrier impairment.

On the plus side, cooler temperatures and lower UV exposure make winter the perfect time to tackle issues like hyperpigmentation, redness or visible capillaries, and do more intensive, age-preventative skin treatments that require more downtime.

It’s a balancing act. As well as mitigating the seasonal changes in your skin, you also want to make the most of the corrective treatments that are best done in winter.

Let’s talk about how to strike that balance…

On the skincare front:

• Stick with a gentle cleanser – I’d put this on a billboard every autumn if I could. Exfoliating/AHA/BHA cleansers should take a backseat in favour of something that’s gentler for your skin barrier. My go-to cleanser is Gentle Clean by Alta Skin, which I developed last year as a non-drying, sensitive-friendly option for my clients.
  

• Go easy on exfoliating at home – and if you’re using vitamin A (e.g. retinol) regularly at home, you likely don’t need to exfoliate at all. I don’t!
  
• Up the hydration – switch to a heavier moisturiser, introduce a facial oil, or add a hydrating serum to your routine. All of the above will help to mitigate dehydration and dryness.

On the treatment front. It really depends on what you’re trying to achieve, but here is what most of my clients spend the winter months doing:

• Micro-needling – great for boosting collagen and elastin, & treating scarring, laxity, fine lines and texture. Skin Pen is my preferred device for micro-needling and gets outstanding results.
  
• Chemical peels – great for acne, scarring and pigmentation – and if you’ve never had one before, they are not as scary or drastic as they sound!
  
• Aerolase – our new favourite treatment and the first of its kind in Auckland. This type of laser is ideal for treating rosacea, visible capillaries, diffuse redness, acne scarring and pigmentation, including melasma.
  

While winter can be tough on your skin, it is entirely possible to mitigate the negative effects of the colder months and emerge glowing and glorious in spring.

Skin Ritual, 3c Short Street

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To view the full Autumn/Winter issue of Newmarket magazine, click here.