Moisturizers and You (Part I)

Moisturizer covers a great deal of ground with no clear distinction about how strong a moisturizer is unless terms such as emollient or lightweight show up.

With the thousands of moisturizers floating through the world, finding out which ones are meant for your skin can be quite a challenge. Not only do you want one for your skin type; normal, dry, oily, combination, or problematic, but you have to know if your skin type truly needs one.

Because you find yourself searching for techniques to improve your dry skin, a moisturizer will more often than not be necessary. However, along with buying a moisturizer you will be faced with even more questions.

Do you need your moisturizer to have agents that firm? Is it anti wrinkle? Anti aging? Do you want organic ingredients?

Too much can make you want to run from any skin care section of a store. Of all the products claiming to be moisturizers, the one thing you must know is for a product to have ingredients that do actively help your skin gain moisture, keep it, prevent it from leaving again, as well as protect your skin from environmental damage and help your skin cells to communicate better.

There is no single ingredient that will do this. If there were, we might as well just slap on that single ingredient and be worry free the rest of our lives. A good moisturizer will rely upon several different ingredients to perform all the functions our skin needs in order to improve and remain healthy.

When a company starts toting products that have new, improved, or breakthrough ingredients, remember that it is mostly fanfare. Though an ingredient may have some nice benefits, it is not going to the miracle ingredient they make it out to be, so do not be fooled by the appearance of the next magical product.

This is not to say that scientists and cosmetic chemists have not come up with some great new ways to help treat our skin. They have found new ways to utilize old components as well as realized the full potential of many organic ingredients.

Botanical extracts, natural oils, astringents, and emollients are now found in a great number of products.

It is also by these means that companies have created multi purpose moisturizers (provided they do what they claim) as well as sunscreens that are able to both protect and moisturize your skin. With the ever looming threat of skin damage, aging, and skin cancer from the powerful rays of the sun, a good sunscreen has become more important than ever.

As the sun can also assist in drying your skin, a sunscreen that moisturizes as it protects can be a very powerful tool to keep the sunbeams at bay. It is important to wear sunscreen as often as possible when you go out into the sun in order to help prevent any skin damage. We have modern advances to thank for dry skin friendly sunscreen.

But during everyday events you may not be in the sun as much as you would probably like. Instead you may be working indoors all day and still have to find a good moisturizer for you dry skin. Then what do you want to look for?

Emulsifiers can either be created by mechanical agitation or through various chemical processes. There are also natural emulsifiers, such as beeswax, that can be added to products to help them merge agreeably.

Moisturizers that can provide you with the following ingredients or abilities will give your skin the best benefits and most assistance when it comes to turning the tables on dryness: skin structure imitators, anti irritants, antioxidants, cell communicators, and emollients.

Each of these provides different functions that work together in repairing your skin. Finding out how each of them works will get you one step closer to healthy, soft skin.