Coming Out of Winter: What to Change in Your Routine in August

By August in Auckland the worst of the cold is behind us, and the routine that got you through it is still in the bathroom. That is the mismatch worth fixing, because the conditions your skin has been reacting to are about to change.

What winter indoors does

Park and colleagues put healthy volunteers in a heated indoor environment for six hours a day in winter and measured what changed. Skin temperature, pore appearance, roughness, redness and wrinkle measurements all increased significantly on the face, and water loss increased on the forearm. Applying a ceramide-containing cream improved elasticity, pores, texture and wrinkle measurements compared with untreated skin.¹

Six hours. That is a working day with the heater on, not a season.

Yang and colleagues followed the same people across seasons and measured how the skin's biophysical properties shifted with them, which is the broader version of the same finding: skin is not a constant.²

Loffler and colleagues found that climatic conditions also change how skin responds to an irritant, which is worth knowing if a product that stung in July feels fine in October.³

The changes worth making

Nothing here needs a new routine. It is mostly subtraction.

• Sunscreen goes back to daily, if it ever stopped. UV climbs from here, and it climbs before it feels like it should.
• The heaviest occlusive can come down a layer. What was right for a heated lounge in July can feel greasy by September, and congestion in spring is often just last season's moisturiser.
• If you paused an active, this is the time to restart it slowly. Skin that has been dealing with dry heated air has had enough to cope with; going straight back to nightly is how people end up irritated.
• Keep the barrier support. The ceramide finding above was measured after a single day of exposure, and heaters do not switch off in August.

If your skin has been tight and flaky all winter and still is, that is worth a conversation rather than another product.

Ask us

Bring in what you have been using. A therapist will tell you what to keep, what to put away until next winter and what is doing nothing.

References

Each PMID resolves on Europe PMC, so you can read the paper rather than take our word for it.

1. Park EH. Effects of winter indoor environment on the skin: Unveiling skin condition changes in Korea. Skin Research and Technology, 2023. PMID 37357654
2. Yang J. Seasonal variations of epidermal biophysical properties in Kunming, China: A self-controlled cohort study. Skin Research and Technology, 2020. PMID 32196767
3. Loffler H. Influence of climatic conditions on the irritant patch test with sodium lauryl sulphate. Acta Dermato-Venereologica, 2003. PMID 14609099