Friday, November 4, 2011

Dry skin.

I've just come in from doing some work in the garden, taken off my gloves, washed my hands and now my skin feels as dry as sticks!! 


One of the age old challenges that we humans have faced is how to preserve our skin in a prisitin condition. Companies have founded fortunes and dystanies on making and promoting various skin care products: each year women and increasingly men, spend billions of dollars worldwide in an attempt to keep their skin "soft and smooth" -but as the poet said: "It ain't easy"!

From the picture above you can see how complicated the whole "skin thing" is, and to imagine that a simple cream could fix all the problems that the skin has to deal with would be stretching ones imagination to the limits. 

The top layer of the skin is composed of dead cells and these are the only ones that we can directly affect: and in that respect it's a bit like "waking the dead"! The idea of moisturizing cream is to deliver water to those dead cells and trap it there so that they can rehydrate and swell, thus reducing the "fissuring" and cracking that can occur in dry conditions. Many moisturizers contain perfumes (in order to value add them -for that read, it makes them more expensive!) The problem with that is that some people are allergic to perfumes which can make "dermatitis" sufferers for instance, worse off than they were before. So in my book, the best "bang for your buck" is a simple combination of Sorbolene and 10% Glycerine: this is a good basic cream and eminently effective.

The problem we also face as we age is the loss of collagen in the lower parts of the skin. This leads to loose skin and wrinkles, and boy would I love to find an answer for that! And when it comes to loose thinning skin, one of the fashion trends of today that worries me when today's youth become the older generation of tomorrow, is the explosion of tattoos, or body art. They may look cute on healthy young skin, but believe me, in 20 or 30 years time when they begin to sag, it's not going to be a pretty picture.

So protect your skin as much as you can: use sunblock to stop the ultraviolet light damaging your dermal collagen: avoid soap where possible as that is very drying and use plenty of moisturizer. It's not the secret of eternal youth, but it will help!

If you have any special tips though that work for you - please feel free to share them: I'm all ears!

 
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1 comment:

Swellbelle said...

When a teenager I was advised by an adult to apply sorbolene to my skin while still wet from the shower. I ignored the information until in my 40s and tried it. Fantastic! We have a cement tank (very high alkalinity) and it dries the skin quite significantly. Applying the sorbolene and then drying off with a towel as usual makes a huge difference to my old dry skin and so I do this every day and no longer have those dry skin issues. I also use sorbolene instead of soap and it is what I apply to my face every day. It is cheap and effective and I love it.