The Feel Good series
Welcome to our feel-good series – articles that go beyond skincare in a bottle, to explore the everyday ways we can boost our skin, physical and mental wellbeing to feel happier, healthier and ready to take on the world!
Changing seasons
When we were kids, it felt like there was this really gradual progression from summer to winter. Maybe that’s why Autumn officially sits in the middle of that transition.
We’d go from running under the sprinkler in the sweltering sunshine, to popping on a cardigan at night for a while, weeks later perhaps, exchanging shorts for pants, and seemingly months after, finally unpacking the coats.
These days – and it might be climate change, or maybe it’s just the loss of those childhood rose-tinted glasses – it feels like one day it’s 30 degrees and every beach is packed, and the next, it’s raining, grey and the wind is nipping at our faces.
Either way, whether winter ‘approaches’ or just all-of-a-sudden ‘rocks up’, there never seems to be enough warning for us to prepare our minds, bodies – and especially our skin – for the colder months.
For many of us, this lack of preparation means a quarter of the year spent desperately trying overnight eye masks to minimise dehydration-related wrinkles, lips that crack right down the middle when we smile, and pigmentation spots standing out so much more against our pale complexions.
Oh, the fun!
No wonder in Australia most of us are hard-core summer people through-and-through.
To add insult to injury, studies (and centuries of anecdotal reports from our friends in England and Ireland) tell us that the cooler months can also have an impact on our mental health, and act as a demotivator, so we tend to turn more to comfort foods and less to the great outdoors.
Overall, for a lot of us, winter can mean skin that’s not at it’s best, mental health that’s not at its best and bodies that are not at their best.
(Wow! This ‘feel-good series’ article just took a serious turn for the worse, didn’t it? What a downer!)
But of course, this wouldn’t be the ‘feel-good series’ if we didn’t pick that right back up, spin it around, fold it a different way, add some glitter and rhinestones and explore how we can actually use winter as an opportunity to look great, and feel better!
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Winter is just the break you need
When you read that heading, ‘Winter is just the break you need’, we can practically hear you scoff all the way from our lab here at Re-Dox HQ.
‘No’, we hear you, loud and clear. ‘The Bahamas is just the break I need! The white sand of a Thai beach and a Mai Thai in-hand, is the break I need! Sheesh, even a quick overnight to the Goldi, away from my kids or job, and a couple of extra degrees, is-the-break-I-need!’
But while our sense of adventure (and need for heat) may not agree, for our skin, winter is an opportunity to recuperate from all those delightful UV rays we soaked up during the summer, from all the sweat we didn’t mop up, and from all those days we forgot our sunnies and squinted into perfectly blue skies.
But it’s only the break our skin needs, if we treat it right. Here’s how:
Prepare BEFORE the frost settles in
This might mean literally nothing for some of you, but when some our or Re-Dox team was young, the real start of winter was ushered in with the first frost of the season – a thin layer of icy slipperiness that coated our front lawns and made the dash out of bed that much cooler.
It was Mother Nature’s was of not-so-subtly declaring, ‘Winter is coming!’.
While all of you will live in different parts of Australia, or even right around the world, so your local weather patterns will be different, likely there will be some signal that the warmer months are behind you and overcoat weather is approaching.
It might be simply that evenings are a bit cooler or mornings take longer to warm up, or it might be something as blatant as winter sport beginning, or the last of the mangoes leaving the shelf at your grocery store.
Whatever else it is, that change is a signal to you that you need to start preparing your skin for winter.
First, you need to assess the damage.
Did you wear sunscreen as often as you should have this Summer? If not, do you have dark spots starting to peak in on fading skin?
Has this season been particularly sweaty, and have you not been quite as good at cleaning up as you should? Has bacteria settled and have breakouts increased?
Have you overlooked moisturiser in lieu of fake tanner, and seen some elasticity loss as your skin has become less hydrated?
Regardless, run a diagnosis on your skin health so you know where you’re starting as winter kicks in and what you’re going to need to continue it as positively as possible. Order in the right products to get your skin back on track and consider if some evidence-based in-clinic treatments might be a nice way to relax and give recovery a head start.
Consider the effects of your environment
If you haven’t seen a ‘slip, slop, slap’ ad in summer, or the equivalent, you mustn’t own a television, use social media networks, or walk on paths that pass bus stops.
The point is, in summer, there is plenty of warning we need to consider our environment when thinking about our skin health (and preventing cancers).
In winter, not so much.
As the cold sets in, there are no billboards letting you know:
- ‘Your heating will suck the moisture out of the air and leave you looking like a dried up, old prune,’
- ‘That gentle breeze will become a stinging wind that will strip your lips from your face.’
- ‘No sun? No matter – UV can still damage your skin!’
Unfortunately, that means you have to do all the heavy lifting yourself and think about what environments you will be most often be in, and how you either prepare your skin for them, or protect your skin against them.
One handy hint, outside of having great skincare, is simply to add a little bowl of water to each room of your home that has heating, to reintroduce moisture back into the air.
Put your guard back up
Obviously this guidance seems counter to any healthy advice you will usually receive relating to your relationships, but when it comes to your skin, your guard – or the skin’s natural barrier – is incredibly important.
The different weather we experience in winter – and the steaming hot showers we take to warm up -- can actually strip or damage your skin’s barrier or cause it to effectively have gaps in it. And when you think about it, your skin is the outside organ that protects all your insides from the world around it.
When that barrier becomes eroded, or broken, one of the first issues you will experience is a loss of hydration – your skin can dry out significantly, and when it does… wrinkles can take over!
This break in protection can also allow nasties like bacteria to get in, at minimum causing irritation, but also potentially causing outbreaks of acne or conditions like eczema, or worse, skin infections.
The good news is, for the most part, protecting or fixing your skin’s barrier is usually fairly straightforward and just comes down to regularly and correctly hydrating your skin, to keep it stronger and more resilient.
Hydrating of course doesn’t necessarily mean a ‘moisturiser’ or something labelled to this effect at the local chemist, but products like hyaluronic acid that can really boost skin health.
Your skin health reflects your wholistic health
While it’s not the most pleasant experience for your skin not to be at its best, skin is actually an amazing translator of messages from the rest of your body, and can be indicative of other issues that need to be tackled.
As an example, break outs of skin conditions can indicate you are feeling a lot of stress or anxiety, and can encourage you to finally book in and get that mental health plan done with your GP, or chat to your mental health specialist to get some extra support.
In winter, it is also quite common for many of us to lose that sun-kissed look from summer, meaning changes in our skin tone can become more noticeable. And when skin loses that soft pinkness, when it becomes more grey, this can be indicative of a chronic health condition, and you should be checked out.
Really feeling good is about looking after ourselves from the inside out and the outside in.
Our skin health is very important, but so is our mental and emotional health and of course our physical health, so it’s always important to listen to what our skin is telling us.
As Jon Snow said in that odd sort of northern/Thor accent, ‘Winter is coming’ – and though it may not be as dramatic for you as it was for Jon, when it comes to your skin, heeding that warning and preparing, really is key to improving your skin health.
