How to Refresh Your Winter Skincare Routine

Winter has arrived! Frigid temperatures, biting winds, and harsh indoor heating are about to sweep in and suck your skin dry. That bright, bronzed skin you boasted over the summer will quickly be quickly replaced by dry, chapped, itchy skin that keeps flaking and patching. 

Sound a little too familiar? 

Dry, dull, damaged winter skin might have been your story in the past, but it doesn’t have to become your reality again this season. All you need to do is refresh your winter skincare routine. 

Stop expecting results from products and regimens that have never delivered on their promises. You have gorgeous, vibrant skin hiding just below the surface; all you need is a winter skin refresh to bring it out!

Signs Your Winter Skincare Routine Needs a Makeover

If you’re dealing with dull skin that doesn’t even begin to reflect the joy and energy inside of you, then it’s time to revamp your winter skincare routine. 

There are three essential factors that you need to embrace to nourish youthful skin: 

• Blood circulation
• Collagen production
• Hydration

One can’t do its job without the others. So when one is missing, the evidence becomes all too clear on your skin. 

Blood Circulation

Your circulatory system is the river of life inside your body. It has the vital responsibility of delivering oxygen, nutrients, hormones, and minerals to your skin cells. It also must flush out toxins, pathogens, and waste. 

So just think about the terrible implications of poor circulation! Your skin can’t glow if it doesn’t receive oxygen, nutrients, and minerals. Worse yet, if toxins and acids accumulate within your skin, it becomes dull, pale, and damaged. 

Collagen Production

Collagen, meanwhile, forms a thick fibrous network of cells in the middle layer of the skin called the dermis. This network of collagen keeps your skin strong, firm, and elastic. 

You can think of collagen as a mattress in the middle layer of your skin. The surface of your skin is the bedsheet. As long as collagen production remains consistent, the “mattress” is always full and strong to support a taut “bedsheet”. 

However, when collagen production declines, the skin becomes wrinkled, saggy, and dull instead. If you don’t take active steps to stimulate collagen production and protect your skin, you can expect to see older, blemished, sagging skin staring back at you in the mirror. 

Hydration

It’s also hard to overstate the importance of hydrated skin. Superior skin health begins and ends with hydration. If hydrated skin is like a plum, then dehydrated skin is the prune. 

When you skin retains hydration, it appears plump and supple instead of wrinkled and saggy. Well-hydrated skin is also less oily because your sebaceous glands aren’t forced to counteract dehydration by overproducing oil.

So Do You Need a Skin Refresh?

It isn’t hard to identify the signs that your skin desperately needs to be revitalized: 

• Poor skin tone
• Pigmentation and discoloration
• Acne and inflammation
• Slower healing
• Wrinkles
• Dark eye circles
• Very oily or dry skin
• Sagging and laxity

You want to glance in the mirror and love what you see, so it’s time to take action and refresh your winter routine. 

The 4 Best Ways to Refresh Your Skin During the Winter

Unfortunately, the commercial skincare products lining your sink and vanity are exacerbating your skincare woes, not making them better.

Just like I always emphasize with flouride toothpaste and aluminum-based deodorant, the most common cosmetics out there are formulated to work against your body, not for it. 

If you’re serious about a winter skin refresh, use these four tips to revitalize your complexion from the inside, out. 

Wash and Moisturize With Natural Oils

We’ve been fed a huge, huge lie about our skin: oil doesn’t belong anywhere near our face. How did that happen, when it’s light years away from the truth?

Oil is actually critical to healthy skin. Hundreds of sebaceous glands produce natural sebum oil all over your face. Sebum oil isn’t the enemy at all! It moisturizes and protects your skin while nurturing the healthy bacteria that keep your complexion bright and vibrant.

Unfortunately, many different factors strip away your sebum oils, including winter weather and commercial skincare products. 

Harsh winds and low temperatures compromise sebum oils and break through the barrier they create on your skin. When the effects of unrelenting winter weather combine with water-based skincare products, your skin’s protective oils can’t do their job. 

Unless your current face wash is formulated with oils, it strips away your natural sebum oils and leaves your skin dry and dehydrated. The most powerful change you can make is to switch to oil-based face wash and moisturizer. 

My trusty favorite, Earth Cleanser, is gentle enough to clean the daily grime from your skin without removing your natural oils! Coconut oil, olive oil, jojoba oil, aloe vera, and rosemary extract help your skin look and feel hydrated, youthful, and healthy. Other pure ingredients like White Kaolin clay, French Green clay, and organic grapefruit peel optimize the ultimate skin refresh. . 

These “skin food” ingredients help your daily washing routine do much more than simply clean your face. They enrich your skin with everything it needs to fight the effects of winter weather, increase collagen production, and enhance skin tone. As an added bonus, ingredients like lavender and honey nurse dry, brittle, damaged skin back to life.

Take your winter skin refresh a step further by moisturizing with a blend of 14 powerful earthen oils. Beyond Face Moisturizer is specifically formulated to revitalize your skin within just weeks of use with these benefits:

• Repair damaged tissue
• Fade signs of scars
• Reduce fine lines and wrinkles
• Help skin tone look even and balanced
• Make signs of aging disappear
• Improve elasticity of skin

The secret to this moisturizer can be found in its Tamanu oil. Research shows that Tamanu oil has the power to heal skin beyond nearly all modern day skincare products.

Its wound-healing activity helps the skin fight inflammation and absorb antioxidants to regenerate damaged skin and produce new skin tissue. 

Emu oil also plays a huge role in Beyond Face Moisturizer thanks to its complete balance of Omega 3, 6 and 9 fatty acids. These fatty acids are essential to skin health and healing. Fatty acids not only maintain the skin’s permeability barrier, but they also inhibit inflammation, promote wound healing, and replenish the skin. In fact, the natural lipids found in Emu oil match those found in human skin, allowing for natural stimulation and rejuvenation. 

The other powerful oils in this product range from helichrysum and chamomile to frankincense and geranium. Each oil contributes its own unique healing capabilities to restore your damaged skin. It’s not too good to be true; it’s just skincare done right. 

Exfoliate Once a Week

Exfoliation receives a bad rap in the winter for allegedly dehydrating your skin, but that’s only when you’re using water-based products that have already set you up for failure.

The truth is that exfoliation facilitates a smooth, soft texture and helps your skin better absorb moisturizer, toner, and serums. If used as a proactive measure against miserable winter weather, your skin can maintain the protective barrier it needs to remain enviably vibrant.

This is all possible because the process of exfoliating forces old, damaged, and unhealthy cells to fall away. As a result, fresh and healthy skin cells take their place. Your body’s natural cell renewal process kicks into overdrive to deliver smoother, brighter skin.

But that’s not all! Exfoliating stimulates circulation and collagen synthesis, two of the critical elements needed for healthy skin. The exfoliation action tricks your skin into thinking it is injured. This automatically stimulates healing responses to produce collagen and get the blood flowing.   As your skin becomes nourished with fresh oxygen and nutrients, its dullness is quickly replaced by radiance.

Just make sure you use an exfoliating scrub that does its job! Most conventional exfoliating products undermine their purpose with water-based formulas that we know don’t work. 

Try an exfoliator made with clays and oils instead. Sweet Revenge Face Exfoliator is made from cane sugar, sweet almond oil, French Green clay, grapefruit peel oil, and even caffeine! Here’s what you can expect from this power team of ingredients:

• Cane sugar’s gentle abrasive action sloughs away dead skin cells, oil, and dirt on your skin and in your pores
• Sweet almond oil base moisturizes dry and irritated skin with rich fatty acids and vitamin E
• French Green clay removes toxins from the skin to revitalize your complexion
• Caffeine kick starts the skin’s anti-inflammatory action to reduce puffiness and improve tone

Thanks to the combined power of these natural ingredients, regular winter exfoliation can be the difference maker for your complexion. 

Supplement Your Nutrients

If you follow a whole-food diet and use skincare products formulated with oils and “skin food”, you’re already on the best path to healthy, supply skin. A natural supplement can support your skin’s performance and “fill in the gaps” that your diet and skincare regime might be missing. 

That’s why I created Simply Beautiful: Hair, Skin and Nails Formula. This one-of-a-kind, advanced nutritional supplement combines key vitamins, minerals and nutrients to support healthier skin, hair and nails. 

Men and women alike can use this supplement to help the skin protect and maintain its youthful appearance and glow.

Check out the most important ingredients that have the power to optimize your skin health:

• Folic Acid supports healthy skin cell growth
• Biotin helps metabolize fatty acids, glucose and amino acids for healthier skin
• Collagen strengthens skin elasticity and hydration
• Inositol, a nutrient in the Vitamin B complex, supports healthy cell membranes and circulation
• Moringa is high in vitamin C, so it boosts collagen production in the skin to reduce fine lines, wrinkles, and sagging skin
• BioPerine boosts nutrient absorption within your body to help you maximize results
• Bamboo extract prevents damage from UV rays and oxidative stress

When you choose a supplement formulated with premium ingredients that work with your body, your skin never has to become a victim of winter weather again.

Try the Quiver

If you’ve never tried the Quiver, consider it your New Year’s Resolution! The Quiver is my ultimate skincare secret; I give it a great deal of credit for helping by 50-year-old skin look 35. Now you can take advantage of it too!

The Quiver is a small device that works by releasing sonic vibrations through soft silicon. As you move the Quiver across your face during your morning and evening skincare routine, the sonic vibrations stimulate incredible anti-aging benefits that counteract winter damage:

• Collagen production — The Quiver’s sonic vibrations stimulation your facial muscles, which in turn triggers collagen production. You simple hold and rock the Quiver across your cheeks, under your eyes, and across your forehead to leave your skin looking lifted, awake, and balanced. 
• Dead skin cell removal — Dead skin cells are swept away with the Quiver’s vibrations. It’s like a mini-exfoliation session as healthy, youthful skin surfaces to replace the dead and damaged skin. This keeps you looking years younger!
• Enhanced Absorption — Since the Quiver also opens your pores with 8,500 vibrations a minute, your skin is ready to absorb and gobble up every bit of face serum, toner, and moisturizer you apply. 

In only two to four minutes a day, the Quiver erases signs of angry winter skin damage. Your skin will look bright and revitalized year-round.

Avoid These Skincare Pitfalls!

Now that you know how to optimize your winter skincare routine, make sure you don’t undermine your efforts with these skincare pitfalls. 

Water-Based Commercial Cosmetics

Water seems like such an unassuming cosmetic ingredient. We know that drinking water is healthy, so wouldn’t water in cosmetic products be healthy as well? 

Not quite. The water used in cosmetic products is usually unfiltered tap water loaded with toxins. And since products that list water as the first ingredient may contain up to 90% water, they contain a significant concentration of tap water contaminants:

• Disease-causing bacteria
• Heavy metals
• Gasoline solvents
• Synthetic chemicals 
• Industrial waste products
• Disinfectant byproducts
• Radioactive substances

Uh, no thanks. I’ll leave the industrial waste products with the hazmat team, not all over my face.

Even worse, water-based skin care products compromise your skin’s hydration instead of improving it.

Sounds counter-intuitive, I know, but hear me out.

The water sits on your skin and evaporates, pulling moisture from your skin in the process. 

Imagine a plum shrinking into a prune… that’s exactly what commercial skincare products do over time! Opt for oil-based skincare products that enrich your skin’s natural anti-aging powers instead. 

Mineral Makeup

Mineral makeup has gained a very loyal following over the years. Clever marketing campaigns launched by Big Cosmo companies portray mineral makeup as safe, natural, and nourishing, but that’s far from the truth. 

All mined minerals must be processed before they’re added into cosmetics. Unfortunately, this process forces minerals through a bath of toxic chemicals that are never removed. Every time you apply mineral makeup, you spread chemical-coated minerals across your skin. 

The minerals are eventually absorbed into your bloodstream, where they trigger skin irritation, hormone disruption, rosacea, acne, and toxicity. 

You want to look beautiful, but your makeup routine shouldn’t come at the expense of your health. Don’t let mineral makeup compromise the healthy skin you’re working so hard to nourish. Choose a natural, mineral-free alternative that is legitimately good for your skin.

I created my clay-based makeup line to give women a way to look and feel beautiful without using questionable or dangerous ingredients. Primal Life Organics foundation, blush, eye shadow and eyeliner are formulated with clay, food, flowers, and herbs. Nothing else!

If Cleopatra couldn’t have used it herself, then it’s not an ingredient in my makeup, because you deserve pure beauty from real ingredients.

Radiant Skin in Every Season

You deserve clear, vibrant skin to accent your favorite winter scarves and knee-high boots.

Dry winter skin isn’t inevitable. It’s avoidable with a natural skin refresh.

You don't need to spend a fortune at a spa or devote an hour every morning to complex cremes and masks.

The answer is simple:  ditch commercial beauty products so that you can nourish your skin with powerful earthen ingredients.

Winter skin damage and signs of premature aging are no match for the healing powers of clay, oils, and nutrients. 

Resource Links:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK279250/
https://www.intechopen.com/books/molecular-mechanisms-of-the-aging-process-and-rejuvenation/molecular-mechanisms-of-skin-aging-and-rejuvenation
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2835893/
https://www.mdedge.com/dermatology/article/77106/wounds/tamanu-oil
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6117694/
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ics.12232