NOTE: This is a transcription of the Skincare Fairy Godmother Podcast Episode 1. It may have been changed slightly for ease of reading vs. listening.
In today's lesson, we're going to learn all about treating skin for changing seasons, as well as breaking down a common misconception around dry and dehydrated skin. So oftentimes, in our language, words get interchanged a lot - dry, dehydrated, they're flip flopped around like they're the same thing. But they're not. In the science of skin. Dry Skin lacks oil, dehydrated skin lacks water. You can have oily skin and still have dehydrated skin, but you cannot have oily skin and have dry skin.
The quickest way to tell which one you have is the pinch test. Take your thumb and your pointer finger and pinch the back of your opposite hand, and if it bounces back quickly, you do not have dehydrated skin. If it takes a while to sort of fall back into place, then you may have dehydrated skin.
If you still can't tell - dry skin, the skin that lacks oil tends to look flaky. Sort of like if you took a fingernail to it, you could kind of scrape off a layer, whereas dehydrated skin tends to just look more dull, like it needs a glass of water - which it does.
Because our skin changes more in wildly swinging temperature climates and because of that, my clients tend to notice that they might have oily skin but it's dehydrated or they might have super dry skin in the winter and then get more oily in the summer. So we typically have to adjust a thing here or there to make sure that their products are suiting their skin for the time of year.
This is just one more reason why I truly recommend seeing a skilled and educated esthetician wherever you are, they can help you throughout the year to adjust your routine to be what's going to fit your skins needs right now.
So an example of a typical routine of my clients might be a cleanser, toner treatment, eye cream, and moisturizer or SPF in the morning. And in the winter, we might do moisturizer and SPF we might not be able to get away with just the sunscreen or at night we might need a thicker moisturizer or put a balm or a salve on top of it.
Another adjustment we might make is to move from a gel cleanser in the summer to more of a creamy cleanser in the winter. There are so many different ways that you can adjust your routine a tiny little bit to make it really work for you.
another thing that you can do if you're not ready to really overhaul your routine is you may need to look at doing something like an occlusive agent over your moisturizer at night, putting on your moisturizer and then putting a thin layer of Vaseline or something like ourTreat//Salve over top of it helps to really lock in the moisturizer and water in your skin or the oil and water if we're talking technical terms.
If you don't have water and oil in your skin to begin with, though, occlusive agents just don't work. It is what it is. Vaseline, while I love it, is not a hydrator - it will not add moisture to your skin but it can lock in what you already have. Same thing with Aquafor, I've heard a lot of people use that on their skin as well. Same idea.
If you have any follow up questions, follow me on Instagram @amberbudd, DM me, ask me some questions - I'll be sure to answer them in a future episode!