Moisturizing My Mug

Part 3 of the “My Mug” series (as I have begun calling it in my mind) will cover a bit about the thing almost everyone knows about: moisturizer. Now, I’m almost 99% sure that you, the reader, already know what moisturizer does, not least because it’s built right into the name. So I probably won’t go on about the basics. Rather, I’ll cover a little bit of the new stuff I’ve learned about moisturizer since engaging in my new skincare routine.

These things are:

1. Sebum and how it works
2. How skin takes care of itself and how you can help it along
3. Using different products depending on the time of day or year

The very first new thing I learned about moisturizer isn’t precisely about moisturizer at all, but about my face and how it works. Sebum, or the oil that our bodies produce and secrete through our pores, is essentially a layer of oil that seals in moisture and keeps the skin feeling healthy and soft. It is generated all over our body, but in our case we’re focusing on the face. Sebum can cause problems if you don’t wash yourself regularly (or if your skin generates too much of the stuff), such as odor and bacteria and clogging  your pores, which in turn causes black- and white-heads.

So, basically, your skin needs sebum, but too much of a good thing will lead to some bad things.

The second thing I learned about moisturizer is that your skin will naturally release sebum onto your skin as it feels it needs it, which means that if your skin feels dry, it will whack a pile of oil onto your face to moisturize itself. If your skin type is dry, this doesn’t technically speak to the state of your skin; it means that your skin doesn’t secrete enough sebum on its own to keep your skin moisturized. If your skin type is oily, this means that your skin secretes more sebum than needed and it starts feeling goopy and gross on your face.

“What does this mean for moisturizers?” you ask me as I asked myself back in the day. What I found out is that, let’s say you wash your face and use toner, and now your skin feels soft and dry to the touch. If you don’t moisturize and your skin type is dry, your skin will naturally get flaky or scaly and make your skin vulnerable to blemishes or irritation, because your skin doesn’t generate enough oil to keep up with what it has lost. If you’ve cleaned your face and don’t moisturize and your skin type is combination or oily, your skin will secrete heaps of sebum to make up for the sudden dryness, causing you to have entirely too much oil on your face, creating the problems mentioned before.

Lots of people (including myself not very long ago) mistakenly believe that if you have oily skin, you don’t need moisturizer. But this is not the case, because not moisturizing will actually make your skin way more oily than it would be otherwise, making you far more acne-prone!

Bottom line: no matter what skin type you are, you can benefit from moisturizer, either to actively reduce oiliness (and prevent pore blockages) or to make up for what your skin cannot produce in adequate quantities.

The third thing (and the last thing I will cover in this post) I learned about moisturizer is that what you use will change with the time of day or time of year. At night, when your skin is in recovery mode, it can benefit from a far thicker and creamier moisturizer. Your skin is naturally dryer at night, not just because of things like air conditioning but also because you’re asleep (and not drinking water or moving and your heart rate is slower) and so your glands aren’t generating sebum at the same rate as they are when you are awake. You may find that you don’t need as thick a moisturizer in the day time because you are awake and active and generating enough sebum to keep your skin happy during the day, so if you have oily skin it can be worth looking into something lighter for the morning regimen.

Winter and summer can have varying impacts on your skin as well, particularly if the air is dryer during one season or wetter during another. I tend to use thicker moisturizers in dry weather and thinner ones in wet, for what I presume are obvious reasons.

Therefore, having a single “holy grail” moisturizer for all year, all day long is nice, but may not be the very best option for your skin if you live in a place with starkly different climates at different times of the year.