1 Best Stay At Home Skin Care Tip According to A Dermatologist

In the current COVID-19 situation, people might think that there is no need to pay attention to stay at home skin care, since staying home is the safest environment for the skin. Whilst it’s true that the home environment is generally a lot more conducive than the outdoor environment for skin, such as avoiding onslaughts from the sun’s ultraviolet, there may be some lesser-known “dangers” to your skin while staying home. In this article, we seek to explore these lesser known stay at home skin care “dangers” and some tips to keep them at bay.

Stay At Home Skin Care “Dangers”

First of all, when indoors and leaving the air conditioning turned on all the time, you may not be paying attention to the ambient humidity. The combination of a dry environment caused by the air conditioner as well as the fact that it is a lot cooler than our usual climate, can increase a phenomenon known as transepidermal water loss. This essentially refers to evaporation of our skin’s innate moisture levels to the environment and this can cause a bit of dry skin in individuals who otherwise have normal skin. For people who are prone to dry sensitive skin, this constant indoor air condition environment may be severe enough to trigger an attack or flare up of eczema.

The other thing in the entire context of us staying home all the time, would be there is definitely less physical activity than if we went about our daily activities. This is especially so for people who are dependant on domestic help, for example, then they may be extremely sedentary during this stay home period and lack of exercise is not good for the skin as it is for the human body as a whole. The skin, like any organ, relies on perfusion or circulation and blood flow to deliver nutrients to it, and even more so, being the largest organ in the human body.

Furthermore, if you are gaining a lot of weight without exercise, that is detrimental to your skin in the long run because fats cells secrete testosterone. Testosterone is the male hormone that causes people to be more prone to acne and greasy skin. Finally, if you are always looking to snacking when you are at home, do bear in mind that if you are eating a lot of deep fried snacks like potato chips or sweets like chocolates and dairy, all these can increase your risk of inflammatory skin conditions, in particular conditions such as adult acne.

Stay At Home Skin Care Tips

The situation of the COVID-19 pandemic and us having to spend a lot of time at home, is a good opportunity for us to pay attention to what is first of all essential, efficient and sustainable, rather than “oh you know I got more time now I’m just going to add on a million and one things to my stay at home skin care regime”. It could be very opportunistic for beauty brands to advise anything otherwise. Therefore, from a dermatologist’s perspective, my advise doesn’t change whether it is in the time of a pandemic or in an ordinary day.

The basic principles are if you are suffering from a skin condition, please get it treated by an accredited dermatologist, rather than going around trying all sorts of different products or googling to see on beauty forums what people use or DIY methods. This is because none of these will work if you truly have a persistent skin problem, that is, anything lasting more than 2-3 weeks and is recurrent or chronic.

If you don’t get that out of the way, no matter how wonderful your skincare regime is, you’re not going to see results. In fact, it would be a blind process trying to encourage somebody to do a stay at home skin care regime, just because they are spending more time at home.

If you have healthy skin or say you are experiencing a little bit of ageing and want to optimise what you do for your skin, it is a good time for people to realise that facials, medispas and even what we consider therapeutic treatments such as cosmetic lasers or HIFU (High Intensity Focused Ultrasound) technology for aesthetic purposes, are not essential services. In a time such as now, these aesthetic services will not be available and are therefore not sustainable.

On the note of sustainability, it is important to see that whatever is science based and is a topical will fare better as stay at home skin care. If you are able to apply the topical yourself, the good news is that you are in full control of it and you do not need anyone else to apply it for you. Nonetheless, it is important to be a voice of discernment in this case so we hopefully can help people on this topic of science-based topicals, or cosmeceuticals.

Cosmeceuticals are cosmetics infused with pharmaceutically bioactive ingredients. There is currently limited regulatory control on cosmeceuticals, so it is important to do your brand and ingredient list research. As a general rule of thumb, we would recommend including plant antioxidants, so look out for an ingredient such as centella or portulaca oleracea which is something that we have included in all of our antioxidant skincare formulations.

In addition, we recommend as basics for stay at home skin care, the use of a stabilised vitamin C serum and a ceramide-based moisturiser. Stabilised vitamin C, such as sodium ascorbyl phosphate, is effective in conferring would healing benefits to skin even at concentrations of 5% or less. This is whilst avoiding the pitfall of skin irritation as with raw un-stabilised ascorbic acid, which is often formulated in higher concentrations at >10% to counter the ease of degradation in atmospheric oxygen. Ceramides, on the other hand, are like to the skin, the cement used to stick brick walls together, and help maintain healthy skin barrier function to regulate water loss which any good moisturiser should.

There is no point in using just serums blindly in a stay at home skin care routine, because at some point in time you do need a cream. This is so even if your skin is very greasy and the key thing is to avoid occlusive creams like paraffin and vaseline. Instead, go for a moisturising cream well formulated with ceramides, which will be helpful even if you have greasy skin. In fact, to treat the greasiness on skin, moisturisers play an important role to target the underlying seborrhea, often a form of reactive seborrhea whereby the skin produces even more oil because of stripping away of its natural oils.

Conversely, with a good moisturiser that hydrates the skin, the skin would gradually learn to produce less oil and become less greasy. For intense hydration and oil control on greasy skin, a well formulated Hyaluronic Acid serum in the range of 1% concentration is essential and would prove essential in stay at home skin care. Do note most commercial brands have concentrations of hyaluronic acid much lower.

A good cleanser also plays an important part in any stay at home skin care routine. If you are wearing makeup, makeup removal is done either with a micellar formulation or an oil based emulsion which essentially both function to dissolve pigments, and the same with mascara, eye makeup and lipstick. However, when staying at home and not really putting on makeup, the second layer in cleansing the skin is probably more important and it may be worth looking closely into the function of your cleanser’s ingredients.

In our practice, we recommend a Honey Cleanser. Honey is naturally anti-bacterial and the cleanser further contains an Arnica Montana flower extract that soothes and calms the skin. The cleanser is also gentle on the skin, and avoids the use of skin-drying surfactants such as sodium laureth sulphate which strips away the skin’s natural oils.

We can’t emphasise enough the importance of using a good cleanser and cleansing regularly. Even if you’re not outdoors, don’t get exposed to pollutants or don’t sweat, know that your body naturally produces some oil. This is the case even if you think your skin is very dry, and excess oil on the skin surface contacts and oxidises with particulates in your house environment, which is how clogged pores are formed.

There could also be lots of indoor pollutants and the indoor environment may not actually be necessarily much better than the outdoors.Very limited studies have been done with indoor pollutants like benzenes, volatile agents, formaldehyde emitted from your furniture, paintwork etc and how these affect the skin. Nonetheless, it is postulated that these will generate some form of free radical formation on the surface of your skin, which contributes to skin ageing. Keeping your skin clean and moisturised is no doubt an important part of cosmeceuticals in a stay at home skin care routine.

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