My Top Home Treatment
for Dry Skin

Affordable Winter Skincare Tips!

This podcast shares my #1 simplest, most affordable home treatment for dry skin, to get you through a long winter or any time that you are suffering from a bout of itchy, flaky, irritated skin!   Transcript is below.

Resources Mentioned

Some affordable options for body care are mentioned in the podcast, like cocoa butter, coconut oil, jojoba oil (non-greasy, great for face and hair).  These are the brands I use.

Some other shampoos mentioned in the podcast that I've tried but that don't work as well as my #1 favorite are: 

Avalon Organics Volumizing Shampoo and Conditioner -  These are good and very affordable, with very little scent, and they do volumize.  For my fine, thin hair they create a dry look, but I prefer this to using no shampoo on the days when I need a break from my regular shampoo.

Morrocco Method Shampoos - These are really nice, non-foaming shampoos that contain clay and other natural ingredients.  They have a strong scent , and I loved the smell of some of them, but they are like potent medicines for my body and created side effects when I was taking medications.  They created a greasy look in my hair, but I loved the earthy feeling on my scalp!  I sometimes will use them as a body wash, which is quite heavenly!  They are more expensive, but the bottles are large and last a long time.

Earth Science Unscented Shampoo and Conditioner - affordable, but when I tried them, they did give my hair that greasy, wet cat look!  They recently upgraded their formula, perhaps the new one will work better.  This shampoo is not gluten free.

Here's the Podcast Transcript

Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of the My Sensitive Skincare Show. It's March 3rd today, and I'm looking out the window at several feet of snow.  Where I live, we've had a very, very difficult winter. So I'm getting emails and messages from people about their extremely dry skin, and I've had a lot of experience with this also during the winter.

Even for those of you that are in the southern hemisphere, you're going into fall now, so you'll be having winter in a few months. I thought that you'd find it helpful to think about a couple of tips for dealing with the really, really, extreme dry skin that comes from being indoors with indoor heat and just your skin feeling really dry.

So, the first thing I want to say about this is that there's all kinds of moisturizers on the market, lots of products. But you don't really have to spend a whole lot of money in order to moisturize your skin. It more just takes a little bit of extra effort.

You know one of the things I find is that I kind of go along, and sometimes out of habit, I just do the same thing even though the seasons are very different, and my skin needs different things at different times of year. So it really just takes a little bit of attention to, "Oh gee, my skin's really dry. So what do I do?"

So the first thing is I would recommend that. . . well, this is a very individual thing. But certainly, your skin and your hair get more dried out when you take more showers and baths.

Now, I just really need to take showers and baths regularly, so I can't limit that in the winter time. But what I do is sometimes just take a little bit of coconut oil or some kind of very, very gentle oil, just a touch of it. And I rub it on my skin after the shower but before I step out of the shower. So you get a lot of moisture without being very greasy.

So, coconut oil is a very nice one, but you can use anything  ... like I saw, what was it? It's like a stick of cocoa butter, so affordable! I really have that in mind too. At this time of year, a lot of people are struggling financially.

You don't want to have to spend a lot of money. So you can have like a stick of cocoa butter. There's all kinds of gentle oils. Some people use sunflower oil or olive oil. It really depends on you and what kind of oils your body tolerates well. Some people even use ghee, which is clarified butter.

So that's just one really simple tip and also to keep your home humidified during the winter. That's really important. And drink a lot of water and eat foods that have healthy fats. It's really important to get enough of those healthy fats that nourish your skin and nourish your body.

The other thing that you might want to consider for your skin care, I personally don't use night cream most of the year because night cream ... generally, I like to let my skin just breathe at night. But when things get very, very dry and parched, you might want to consider something very gentle to put on your face.

I find with very sensitive skin that putting anything on my face, I can wake up and my eyes are itchy from reacting to what I put on my face. But I found good results with the Cleure night cream. And it actually does have a noticeable difference. You'll wake up, and your face actually looks nice. So that's something. It's very gentle and extremely moisturizing, so you wake up and your skin will not be dry. So that's another very simple tip for the winter time. And also at this time of year, those of us that are looking particularly weathered can remember that spring is coming soon!

One other tip that I wanted to recommend that's in relation to hair care, and this is from my own experience in the winter also. Using the same types of shampoos and conditioners over and over again, at some point, you might notice that your hair actually doesn't look so good even though it's a shampoo that works great for you.

You know I have this experience because I have never found another shampoo that works as good as the Cleure shampoo.
But if I just use that, I find that over time, my hair ... I don't know what it is. I guess experts can talk more about that. But I found that rotating occasionally is very important. There's all kinds of ways that you can do that.

If you haven't found another good shampoo, you can take a break and just rinse your hair like with apple cider vinegar or baking soda or just go a day ... some people don't like to do that because your hair gets greasy.

There's using dry shampoo like corn starch, just using some gentle cornstarch. Or if you have darker hair, you can add a little cocoa butter to the cornstarch and put that in your hair and just shake it out, and it will take out the oiliness without having to actually wash your hair.

I actually did find a couple of shampoos that... they don't work for me as well as the Cleure shampoo, but they're not too difficult. So I'll share that on the website once I've put this podcast up so you can see. And the other thing that I want to say about hair care is also in the winter, it may be that you don't need to wash your hair quite as much. And that will help it from drying out.

I hope that you have found these small tips for winter very helpful. And I've really enjoyed sharing them here at the My Sensitive Skincare Show. Please join me again for our next episode. And I will have the transcript and the links up soon. So thank you and lots of love and blessings to everyone.