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Dryness, dehydration, sensitivities…winter can throw so much at your skin that it’s easy to see why so many people struggle to maintain their summer glow throughout the colder months. The good news? With a few simple tweaks to your winter skincare routine, you’ll be able to cater to your skin’s seasonal needs and ensure luminescence for the foreseeable future. All it takes is understanding exactly what your skin needs to make it through the season, which Lionesse is about to explain!
Moisture, Moisture, and More Moisture
Your skin needs plenty of moisture throughout the year. However, these needs grow significantly in the winter when moisture loss rises. The low humidity in the air increases transepidermal water loss – the rate at which moisture evaporates out of the skin. This is exacerbated by the decline in sebum production, which affects the skin’s ability to retain moisture.
For this reason, boosting your skin’s moisture levels as much as possible should be the focus of your winter skincare routine. To do this, these are the two steps you’ll need to take:
Add Moisture to Your Skin
The first step is to ensure that your winter skincare routine contains plenty of hydrating ingredients. Certain ingredients are known for drawing moisture to the skin – these are what your winter routine should be packed with. Ingredients like hyaluronic acid, glycerin, lactic acid, and amino acids, all of which can be found in the Lionesse Opal Sheer Collagen Serum, have this effect.
If dehydration is an issue for your skin in the winter, a single hydrating serum is unlikely to bring in enough moisture. Instead, you’ll see the best results if you hydrate your skin in layers. This means ensuring that hydrating ingredients feature in multiple stages of your winter skincare routine.
Lock the Moisture in
With the dry winter air around you constantly pulling moisture out of your skin, simply adding it back won’t make a long-term difference. All of that newfound moisture will soon evaporate, leaving you back at square one.
This is why, in addition to hydrating your skin, a noticeable moisture boost will only be experienced if your winter skincare routine also focuses on locking that moisture in. This means sealing the surface of your skin with richer products that contain occlusive ingredients. They form a thin film over the skin’s surface, slowing moisture loss right down.
Plant oils and butters do this particularly well, which is why the Lionesse White Pearl Night Cream is always a popular choice on winter evenings. With its blend of shea butter and sunflower seed oil, it efficiently locks moisture in without weighing the skin down.
A Gentle Touch
The loss of natural oils and ceramides in the winter is a big problem for your skin. Not only does sebum production naturally slow down at this time of the year, but the harsh winter elements also strip these away.
The result is skin that’s suddenly more vulnerable to irritation, sensitivities, and damage, hence the need for a gentler approach to skincare:
Go Easy When Cleansing
Cleansing is something that you do twice a day, meaning that how you cleanse will have a big impact on your skin. At this time of the year, harsh cleansers should be avoided. Pick a formula that supports and strengthens your complexion while it cleanses, just like the Lionesse White Pearl Facial Cleanser. This sulfate-free cleanser features a lush blend of argan oil, moringa seed oil, aloe vera, and lavender extract, creating a decadent lather that leaves the skin feeling buttery-soft and exquisitely refreshed.
Cut Back on Exfoliation
Just like cleansing, using the wrong exfoliator in your winter skincare routine can have a serious impact on your skin. Over-exfoliation is so common at this time of the year, when the skin is extra vulnerable. So, just like when choosing a cleanser, make sure your winter exfoliator features gentle, skin-loving ingredients – the Lionesse White Pearl Facial Peeling is the perfect example!
If your skin type is dry or sensitive, you may also want to cut back on how often you exfoliate your skin in the winter. Even with a gentle exfoliator, exfoliating too often will still leave your skin feeling inflamed and irritated.
If you suspect that you’re already dealing with the symptoms of over-exfoliation, stop exfoliating for a while. You’ll need to give your damaged skin barrier some time to heal before you consider exfoliating again. Fortunately, that’s where our next tip comes in…
Barrier Support
Being gentle with your skin will go a long way in helping to preserve skin barrier integrity in the winter. However, at this harsh time of the year, your skin barrier will always benefit from some extra support. With this barrier responsible for both keeping moisture in and keeping impurities/allergens out, giving it a helping hand is worth the effort:
Know Your Ingredients
If you want to ensure that your winter skincare routine is barrier-friendly, you’ll need to get familiar with some of the skincare ingredients that are both good and bad for that barrier. Peptides, for instance, are known for being some of the best ingredients for leaving the skin barrier feeling fortified. That’s why you’ll find peptides in several Lionesse skincare products, including the Morganite Transforming Serum. Niacinamide, ceramides, hyaluronic acid, and plant oils are all also great for providing barrier support.
In addition to knowing which ingredients are beneficial for your skin barrier, it’s also important to understand which ingredients to stay away from. While some skincare products may promote themselves as being barrier-friendly, this won’t always be the case. The only way to know is to trawl through those ingredient lists to make sure that those formulas don’t contain sulfates, denatured alcohol, harsh acids, and harmful preservatives.
Skin Cycling is Worth Exploring
As you now know, the winter months can throw the skin barrier into turmoil. The last thing that it needs is for you to overwhelm it even more. However, this is exactly what happens if you overload it with powerful active ingredients in the winter. Yes, it may have tolerated those ingredients just fine over the summer, but let’s not forget about the gentle touch that we discussed earlier. Overly potent actives are the opposite of this.
Don’t worry, this doesn’t mean that you’ll need to give up your favorite active ingredients each winter. There are a few different ways in which you can keep them in your routine while buffering the potential irritation they can cause, with skin cycling being a particularly popular method.
Skin cycling involves following a slightly different skincare routine each night over the course of four nights. The routine on night one would include exfoliation, while night two is when you’d use your chosen actives. Then, nights three and four are all about recovery and barrier support. It’s a great way to continue using active ingredients in the winter without further compromising your skin barrier.
Try Slugging
Slugging is another skincare technique that’s all about barrier support. It involves carrying out your winter skincare routine, ensuring that there are plenty of hydrating products in it. Once you’re done, you’ll follow up with a thin layer of petroleum jelly. Like a moisturizer, this forms a seal over the skin’s surface. The difference is that the seal provided by petroleum jelly is much more substantial since the skin doesn’t actually absorb any of the product. Instead, the petroleum jelly sits on the skin’s surface, protecting what lies beneath while giving the skin a super-shiny, slimy appearance.
When slugging, the petroleum jelly essentially performs the role of your skin barrier. This gives your natural barrier some time to recuperate and regenerate. This is such an important part of keeping your skin barrier feeling supported.
Avoid Hot Water
While a hot shower may feel like a necessity in the winter, it’s not doing your skin barrier any favors and is definitely not what your skin needs right now. Instead, each time you expose your skin to hot water, various components of your skin barrier melt and wash away. You’ll struggle to give your skin barrier the reinforced feel that it needs if, at the same time, you’re subjecting it to hot water each day.
So, while a lukewarm shower may not feel quite as satisfying, it really is the best way forward for your skin. Give it a try for a few weeks, and you’ll likely notice that your skin takes on a deeper glow.
UV Protection
The final must-have in your winter skincare routine? Sun protection. It’s something that people don’t often think about in the winter, especially if you live somewhere that barely sees the sun. However, those UV rays are ever-present and ever-damaging. If you want to keep your skin looking tight and bright for years to come, UV protection is crucial.
To make sure that your skin is fully protected, always go for a broad-spectrum sunscreen. This means that it will protect against both UVA and UVB rays. SPF 30 is the minimum SPF level recommended by dermatologists. While you may need a higher level of protection in the summer if your skin is sensitive, SPF 30 is usually sufficient for all skin types in the winter.
The best way to start the day with protected skin is to incorporate a sunscreen into your morning skincare routine. Then, make an effort to reapply it every couple of hours until the sun goes down.
Is Your Skincare Routine Winter-Ready?
With the skin going through some significant changes as temperatures and humidity levels drop, adapting your skincare routine in line with this is essential if you want to keep your skin feeling healthy throughout the season. Follow the tips that we’ve shared above, and you’ll soon have a winter skincare routine that perfectly caters to your skin’s seasonal needs.
Click here to elevate your winter skincare routine with more bestselling products from Lionesse.
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