Aromatherapy Tips For Winter Skin Care Protection
The weather here in the U.K. is still all over the place, with temperatures both above and below typical seasonal averages, making it tricky to know just what to wear to keep warm outdoors.
However, make certain that you don’t skimp on your skin care protection when the weather turns milder since it takes time for the skin to respond to any remedial action that you take in response to colder weather. Prevention is always better than cure.
Maintaining a regular winter skin care regimen is vitally important to ensure your skin receives all the nutrients and protection it needs every single day to remain healthy and hydrated. Failing to do this can wreak havoc on your skin causing sore, dry, and cracking skin patches that can be difficult to restore if they are left untreated.
At this time of year it’s all too easy to get caught in a cycle of dry and flaky skin that progresses to sensitive skin, eczema, or even worse as the acid mantle protecting your skin is disrupted, thereby allowing bacteria to penetrate and cause infection.
Protect and hydrate
Even being indoors during the winter can be challenging for your skin. Central heating keeps us warm and cosy in the house while its cold outside, but it has a very drying effect on the skin, over time. In fact, during the winter months our skin can lose up to 25% of its normal moisture levels due to the climate outdoors and drying central heating indoors. It’s easy to see why you need to adjust your regular beauty regime to avoid itchy, flaky, dehydrated skin during winter.
Utilising the moisturising properties of aromatherapy carrier oils is one of the easiest ways to help to keep your skin soft and supple when the first of the colder weather approaches, since they can be used straight out of the bottle. In addition, they are natural, plant-based, nutritious and protective. A nutritious carrier oil such as argan, jojoba, moringa, macadamia or rosehip oil with the appropriate essential oils added will give you good protection against the harsh winter weather and can actually help to reverse the effects that the environment has had on your skin.
As winter progresses and becomes steadily colder it makes sense to add cell-renewing essential oils such as frankincense, neroli, rose or sandalwood to increase the therapeutic power of your protective and moisturising home treatments. For an effective facial blend simply add a total of 2 drops of essential oil to 10mls of carrier oil, and apply a small amount morning and evening just as you would your usual moisturiser. Facial skin is more sensitive than the rest of your body, so if you decide to use 2 different essential oils for a power-packed treatment, use only 1 drop of each oil so that you don’t exceed this maximum concentration for facial treatments.
Professional aromatherapy bases
If you want to get the very best levels of protection and hydration for winter skin care, use a professional skin care base to make your own personal winter skin care treatments. High quality hypoallergenic cream and lotion bases are ideal as carriers, especially if they have been infused with healing and protective botanicals as is the case with Aroma-botanicals professional cream bases and lotion bases.
Since these professional products were specially formulated for aromatherapists to add essential oils for clinical treatments with clients, they will work wonders for you at home as well. Adding the correct essential oils will help to nourish and rehydrate dried, flaky or chapped skin faster because the oils work together with the active botanicals to create a powerful synergistic treatment.
Soothe and protect
If the cold and windy weather outside has caused your skin to become red and sore, Roman chamomile and lavender essential oils work together perfectly to soothe and calm the irritation. In my experience, these two oils combined work miracles on all types of skin problems when used in a cream or lotion base.
Geranium, palmarosa and sandalwood are excellent essential oils to moisturise and protect the condition of your skin at any time of year, but are especially useful during the winter months. Sandalwood essential oil, in particular, has moisturising and nourishing properties that no other essential oil can compete with – and you only need one drop in a blend to receive effective results, so it is a cost effective essential oil in the long run.
Repairing blotchy skin and thread veins
It can be hard to avoid developing patches of red, blotchy skin when your skin has been lashed by driving wind and rain. If left untreated these patches inevitably become larger and sensitised, and sometimes quite sore. A combination of soothing Roman chamomile and regenerating frankincense essential oil will usually bring about a dramatic improvement for blotchy skin, or as an alternative you could blend lavender and frankincense together.
The harsh winter weather plays absolute havoc with thread veins (broken capillaries), causing them to become much more visible when your skin thaws out after returning indoors from the cold outside. Frankincense and neroli essential oil can help reduce thread veins with the added benefit that they encourage new skin cell growth too. Used individually or together, visible results can often be seen after only a few weeks of regular use.
Rose Otto is the ideal essential oil for treating broken capillaries since it also helps to maintain elasticity and strengthens the collagen and elastin fibres of the skin by improving micro-circulation. Rose has to be the finest oil for facial skin care treatments, since it can be used alone or mixed with other great facial oils such as lavender, geranium, palmarosa or sandalwood.
When applying skin care treatments to your face always include the skin down to the décolleté (lower neck area) since it can show the signs of ageing long before the face does.
Copyright © Quinessence Aromatherapy Ltd 2023. Written by Sue Charles
