MY CARTWhat causes dehydrated skin?
What causes dehydrated skin?
There are a number of different factors that can trigger dehydrated skin, however it's often as a result of using harsh or overly abrasive skin care products. These products might contain irritating ingredients that disturb your skin barrier or microbiome. Using the wrong products for your skin type, for example if you use products more suited to oily skin when you actually have dry skin, can also lead to an imbalance which can cause dehydration. Essentially, dehydrated skin is your skin's way of telling you that it doesn't like how it is being treated.
As well as the products in your skincare routine, other external factors can also contribute to this skin condition:
Environmental Factors
Sun - UVA from the sun is one of the major culprits for dehydrating our skin. A little bit of sun can give us the essential vitamin D that our body needs, but too much sun accelerates the ageing process and increases both free radicals in the cells and oxidants in the skin.
Summer weather along with the sun, often comes heat and dry air. This is also very dehydrating.
Winter weather such as wind, rain and frost can result in dull, lifeless, red skin.
Air-conditioning and central heating sometimes in hot or cold weather, we want to cool or warm the body up, but using air-con or central heating too much can take the hydration and life out of our skin.
Health Factors
Menstrual cycle our skin changes depending on the stage of our menstrual cycle. Our skin is at its worst when we are in the premenstrual stage as our estrogen levels drop, and estrogen helps to keep our skin hydrated, supple and smooth. We are also more acne prone in the days leading up to menstruation.
Pregnancy: throughout pregnancy, the body uses high amounts of water, so it is more susceptible to becoming dehydrated.
Medication: there are certain medications that cause water loss in the skin.
Ageing: as we get older, our skin starts to lose its ability to retain water, making us more likely to have dehydrated skin.
Excessive sweating: simply put, as we sweat, we lose water in the body and in the skin, and sweating excessively makes replacing these lost fluids a little harder.
Lifestyle Factors
Hot showers, baths and hard water- in places where the water quality is hard, there is a higher level of limestone that can strip the water from the skin. Having shorter baths and showers can reduce the dehydrating effects hot water can have on the skin.
Stress - stress can be hugely detrimental on the skin. Over time, it can cause a person to age quickly and prematurely. It can also cause a host of other skin issues including redness, acne, dryness, and of course, dehydration. When the body is stressed, its response is to overproduce the cortisol hormone. Our adrenal glands are always producing cortisol, but when we feel the effects of stress, our bodies can produce too much. Cortisol is inflammatory, and while it can affect the body in many other ways, it also decreases your body's ability to retain water. The result is dull, dehydrated skin.
Diet- coffee is a staple in many of our diets, but the bad news is that this daily habit could be keeping you in a constant state of dehydration. This is because caffeine is a diuretic, meaning that it dehydrates the skin.
