How I Deal with My Dry Skin

I’ve been dealing with dry skin my whole life but it seems that it took a turn for the worse this year. This is how my forearm looks like:



I actually sharpened the image so you can clearly see the “scales”. Believe it or not, this actually looks better now compared to last week and the weeks before that. 

Here are my personal tips on dealing with dry skin.
Hydrate
It’s very important that you keep yourself hydrated with water especially during summer. I drink about 3 liters or more of water each day and it’s still not enough so my doctor put me on a Gatorade diet. Aside from water and juices, I drink 1 glass of Gatorade daily.

Use gentle bath products



Avoid strong scents. If you can get an unscented product, do so. I personally can’t use unscented products as I really want my bath products to have even a bit of fragrance in them. I think Dove beauty bars and shower creams are the best for dry skin. I especially love this shower cream because it really helped the condition of my skin.

Exfoliate




Most whitening products dry your skin out even further but the Asian Secrets Lulur Body Scrub is the only body scrub that works on my sensitive skin so I stick to it.  It’s very gentle and I never over-exfoliate no matter how hard I scrub. Exfoliate twice a week and really give your body a good scrub to get rid of all those dead skin cells or in my case, scales!

Keep the moisture in

Baths can make your skin dry. Use cold water instead of hot water if you have very dry skin. After showering or bathing, be sure to lock the moisture in. Use body oils right after you towel dry yourself. Actually, it’s better if you leave a bit of moisture on your body and then apply the oils. My personal favorites are TBS Satsuma Oil and Neutrogena Body Oil. This is the old version that smells nice. I read that they changed the scent and a lot of people are complaining about it. These get absorbed by my skin fast.

If you want to take it further, you can apply lotion about an hour after your shower. I choose this Blushing Nectarine lotion because it’s light for summer but rich enough to moisturize my skin.

For really drastic dry skin, I use the Aveeno Skin Relief Moisturizing Cream. This is my HG product for dry skin. Now you might wondering why my arm still looks like that. It’s because I’m not using Aveeno right now. I just can’t use it in this heat. This is a very thick cream and I don’t want to feel all hot and sticky the whole day. When the weather gets cooler, I will immediately use this.

I shower at least twice a day so I make sure to apply these products at night as well. Overall, I think the Gatorade diet has helped me the most because I can truly see the improvement after just one week. My husband is very concerned about my skin and health and he keeps checking my arm to see if it has improved. I think he will be happy with the results. The key to making your dry skin better is sticking to your dry skin regimen. Do it religiously and you will definitely see results. 

Do you have dry skin? How do you deal with yours?