Lifestyle Choices

Everyone suffers at some time from dry skin. When your skin is dry, you reach for a moisturizer. But effective moisturizing involves more than just day cream or lotion.

When doctors look at dry skin under a microscope, they see that it is actually an accumulation of dead cells adhering to the skin’s surface. These cells are made of the protein, keratin, which can absorb water, changing from dry, tile-like flakes to smooth, plump cells. Natural, moist, supple skin depends upon the complex interaction of these surface cells with the environment, with water, with your body’s secretions, or with moisturizers you apply.

Moisturizing your skin is a four-step process, as follows: 1) prevention of excess dryness as best you can by proper cleansing and avoiding harsh environments; 2) removing the excess dry dead surface cells by exfoliation; 3) bringing water to the skin’s surface; and 4) preventing that water from evaporating. The last two steps can be achieved by using a good quality moisturizer! The body has two kinds of natural moisturizer:

Natural moisturizing factors (NMFs), which attract and bind water.

Lipids secreted by the sebaceous glands, which seal in that water.

NMFs include amino acids; urea; phospholipids; creatinine; lactic, glycolic, and uric acids, to name a few. Although harsh washing can temporally deplete the skin of its NMFs and natural lipids, these are normally replenished within hours. More important, in dry environments (especially under 40 percent humidity), any water on the surface of our warm skin evaporates, drying the surface. Skin surface lipids are essential, to seal in the moisture.

Skin Moisturizer

Moisturizing the skin is a delicate balance between adding water and preventing evaporation. The “name of the game” is to decrease “transepidermal water loss” (TEWL). This means getting the water to the surface cells and then keeping it there!

Humectants (like NMFs) attract water to the skin’s surface. Unless environmental humidity exceeds 70 percent, the water on your skin’s surface comes from the deeper layers of your epidermis and from your dermis. If the body is warmer than the surrounding environment, that surface water evaporates resulting in increased water loss. After several hours of this evaporation, the skin is even drier then before and the humectant must be reapplied (much to the joy of the cosmetic companies who sell you the product).

A humectant alone, therefore, is not enough; a good moisturizer must have something to keep the moisture on the skin’s surface from evaporating — an occlusive ingredient.

Examples of humectants are glycerine, honey, propyline glycol (which can cause occasional allergic reaction), butylene glycol, sorbitol, gelatin, lecithin, pyrrolidone carboxylic acid (PCA), and hyaluronic acid. Collagen, elastin, and DNA serve very important functions within our bodies, but when applied to the surface of the skin they are simply expensive humectants. Their molecules are too large to be absorbed through the skin, and they cannot possibly function from the skin’s surface in building skin structure or stimulating reproduction of cells, despite what advertisements might suggest. Neither do I recommend placental extract which serves as a surface humectant, but nothing more. Lactic acid and urea are excellent humectants that are also keratolytic, decreasing the adherence of dry surface cells, thereby moisturizing in two ways.

Occlusives (like natural lipids) act to decrease TEWL by locking in surface moisture. The most common occlusives are petroleum and animal fats such as lanolin, a mixture of natural sheep oils. Although cruder lanolins that were used in the past often caused irritant reactions, the lanolin used today is more refined and far less irritating, closely resembling natural human secretions. Mink and turtle oils are often promoted. Unfortunately, they are not as good as lanolin, and they will certainly not give you the sheen of mink or the long life of the turtle!

Olive, safflower, corn, wheat germ, palm, almond and sesame oils are examples of unsaturated vegetable oil occlusives (not quite as effective as animal fats). Beeswax and vegetable waxes as well as lecithin and cholesterol are also occlusives. Silicone oils are not only occlusive but are also “filters” which make the skin appear smoother. The problem with all occlusives, especially occlusives containing mineral oil or cocoa butter, is that they often exacerbate acne or irritant reactions. If you have oily skin, you may never need a moisturizer on your face!

There are several high-tech advances in the cosmetic chemistry of moisturizers, particularly in the development of time-release systems such as microencapsulation, nanospheres, lipospheres, and liposomes (onion-like spheres — with layers of lipids enclosing layers of water-soluble ingredients — designed to release their moisturizing for up to 12 hours as each layer is sequentially absorbed). New polymers and new forms of hyaluronic acid may also prove to enhance skin moisturization.

There is a bewildering array of moisturizers available. Moisturizers vary not only in their ingredients, but also in the proportion of oil and water they contain. There are two basic formulations: Water-based (”oil-in-water“) and oil-based (”water-in- oil“). To recognize the type of moisturizer, dot a small amount on the back of your hand. If it feels cool, it’s water-based; if it’s warm, it’s oil-based. Lotions, gels, and most creams are water-based; ointments are oil-based. “Oil-free” formulations contain synthetic moisturizers in place of natural oils.

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