Start by asking yourself how many chemicals you can put on your skin every day. In other words, think like your skin.
Sensitive skin often occurs because of too many chemicals going on the skin. Notice that whether the chemical is good or bad is not the issue. It’s the sheer number of chemicals.
That moisturizer you have probably has at least fifty different chemicals in it. Your body would have an easier time eating that moisturizer than your skin has in processing it.
The ingredients on the label may show oils, or extracts, and other things you think of as skin food. But there is no such thing. Those ingredients are made up of chemicals that your skin has to process. Meaning it has to break them down and haul them away.
To process those chemicals takes energy – a lot of energy. The skin thinks of every chemical as an invader, not a nutrient. The skin is there to protect the vital organs and prevent anything from getting inside the body. Nothing gets past me! It is a guard dog.
Now you have applied a moisturizer and your skin is not happy. It has to go to work and deal with every one of those chemicals.
The energy it takes to do that can make your skin tired looking.
It gets weaker. That also means cells shrink and do not hold moisture in and around them – and so you put more moisturizer on, that is, more chemicals.
Let’s go back for a moment. When you apply those chemicals, the skin recognizes the chemicals as “bad” or “not bad”. Notice that it doesn’t recognize them as “good” or “bad”. Just “bad” or “not bad”. But if you continue to apply those not bad chemicals every day, the skin will switch its opinion from “not bad” to “bad”.
The chemicals the skin allows as “not bad” are usually those that will stay on the surface. Up until about 1980-85 almost every moisturizer was based on petrolatum going back nearly one hundred years. Petrolatum is a highly purified and neutral white, cotton candy looking, greasy – but not oily – chemical. If you have experienced Vaseline®, it is close to that.
The skin thinks ho-hum no worries, not bad, because petrolatum wasn’t going any deeper than the first few layers of dead cells (squames) at the skin surface.
Petrolatum is still the best moisturizer you can use. It will retain moisturizer in the skin better than anything else, by far.
But it fell out of favor because “natural” (meaning “plant-based”) ingredients became very important to consumers. The incidence of skin irritation was (and is) much higher from plant-based products than from petrolatum.
Because they are not as effective in maintaining a moisture barrier they are applied more often. The result is sensitive skin.
Petrolatum formulas however were often poorly thought out and greasy feeling, and a heavy thick layer of those formulas covering the skin led to breakouts, especially if makeup was also involved.
Today, most moisturizers are composed of plant-based oils and often a skin biomimetic like hyaluronic acid. Biomimetic means it is very similar or exactly like a chemical inside the body – and that was thought to be a great idea also.
Various biomimetic ingredients have come and gone over the years since 1985 – superoxide dismutase was one and another still found in some products is sodium 5-oxo-2-pyrrolidinecarboxylate that is found on the label as Sodium PCA. More recently hyaluronic acid has become all the rage.
The problem with these biomimetics is that the skin, initially fooled, slowly (for some people, quite quickly) but surely begins to look at these chemicals as a tissue transplant and a rejection mechanism comes into play.
Now this rejection is not a lot of screaming and shouting. It takes time for most of us to notice something is wrong, and our skin is usually pushed right to the edge but not over it.
What happens though is that the very next thing you apply to your skin a flare up occurs – you pushed it over the edge – and not because the new chemical was bad or not bad – but because the skin had been slowly weakened over time.
Suddenly your skin is sensitive all the time.
About 30% of us can continue to use hyaluronic acid for a long time, but for most of us it is a stealth operator. It sure feels great though.
So, what to do?
1) Apply a moisturizer only every once in a while. If you have a habit of applying it daily, lose that habit or prematurely age your skin and become a moisturizer addict. Not good.
2) Avoid moisturizers with dozens of natural extracts and a list of ingredients that is endless. A few extracts, some plant oils, some glycerine, some chemically sounding polymers are okay. Even hyaluronic acid a few times per week.
3) If you have a “magic” moisturizing product and your skin just blooms when you use it – apply it less frequently. This is opposite to what you are told, but give your skin some credit when it says, “well, not bad”.