So, you’ve been slathering yourself with lotion day and night while following a strict and healthy skin care routine. But, your skin is still as dry as the sahara desert. In fact, it feels even more tight and rough than before you started following your new routine.

A situation that’s made you repeatedly ponder the question: Why is My Skin so Dry Even When I Moisturize?

However, instead of letting the frustration take over and disturb your mental well being, you’ve decided to get to the root of the problem and hopefully find a solution. Well, we’re here to tell you that you made the right decision because there is good news. That’s because fixing dry skin is only a matter of making a few small changes to your daily routine.

This article will explain some of the most common causes of dry skin in addition to some ways in which you can address them. So, without any further ado, let’s get straight into it.

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Symptoms of Dry Skin

Something you need to know is that dry skin rarely exists on its own. It actually comes with plenty of other symptoms that you may have also experienced. These include:

Peeling, cracked or flaky skin.
Mild to moderate itchiness in your skin.
The skin may feel warm to the touch.
The skin may have a pink/red complexion.
It may display an ashy appearance (usually occurs in brown or black skin)
You may have to deal with regular breakouts and congealed skin.

Why is My Skin so Dry Even When I Moisturize

Causes of Dry Skin

As we mentioned earlier, getting to the bottom of why your skin is suffering from dryness is incredibly important to figure out how to fix the condition. Now, there are a few common causes that could cause dry skin as a side effect. These include:

1. Heat

If your skin is in direct contact with heat regularly, it could cause extreme dryness that becomes difficult to get rid of.

More specifically, we’re talking about the heat it feels when you take a long, hot shower. As extremely hot water temperatures have been known to strip off the natural oils from your skin, which eventually leads to dryness. To add to that, it can also inflame your skin causing it to go red/pink and feel extremely itchy. It can also make your skin feel unusually ‘tight’ which is similar to the feeling of getting sunburnt.

Staying cool or warm by cranking up the air conditioner or electric heater isn’t a solution either as both these systems can dry out the air in your environment, leading to your skin not having access to any moisture and eventually turning dry.

2. Extreme Cold Weather

Just like extreme heat, extreme coldness can also negatively affect your overall complexion and the health of your skin. That’s because extreme cold also sucks out all the moisture from the surrounding area, making the humidity levels drop sharply. Which eventually leads to your skin getting dehydrated.

To stop your skin from getting too dry, we’d recommend limiting prolonged exposure to the elements and strong winter winds in addition to swapping to a thicker moisturizer that has some soothing properties.

3. Lack of Hydration

The simplest and likeliest cause for your skin feeling dry may be that you’re not drinking enough water. You might’ve heard that the skin is the largest organ in your body.

Well, considering its huge size it follows that it needs plenty of hydration to keep the dryness away. While a lack of water doesn’t necessarily cause dry skin (it causes dehydrated skin which is different), it still causes the same symptoms as you would experience with dry skin.

Why Your Skin Feels Dry Even After Moisturizing?

We mentioned in the intro how your continued dry skin could lead to you asking: Why is my skin so dry even when I moisturize?

Well, it could be the case that you’re applying too much moisturizer. Over moisturizing your skin can have harmful side effects to your skin’s natural production of oils.

To explain it plainly, once you start applying moisturizer more than you normally would, it signals to your skin that it already has moisture. This leads to your skin turning lazy in producing the lipids it usually would due to it believing that it already has plenty of moisture.

Thus, when this slows down your skin’s natural oil production, it could lead to your skin becoming dryer and dryer.

As a result what you might’ve believed as your skin not absorbing moisturizer could turn out to be the opposite as it might be absorbing too much moisture and crying out for oil not water. Alternatively it could also mean that you’re using a moisturizer that’s too heavy for your skin.

What Do Dermatologists Recommend for Extremely Dry Skin?

Dealing with dry skin can be tricky if you haven’t been able to pinpoint the exact problem that;s causing it. However, dermatologists do have some general suggestions that could help you get rid of your dryness pretty quickly.

Firstly, they advise against using active or prescription skin care products like retinol, which can actively cause dry skin. In fact, while retinoids do provide anti-aging effects to skin, they can also worsen dry skin symptoms and break down your skin’s natural barrier, leaving it feeling extremely flaky and inflamed.

If it’s prolonged exposure to hot water that’s causing dryness in your skin, these professionals recommend grabbing a blanket instead of taking multiple hot showers to warm yourself up in the winter.

Lastly, almost every dermatologist suggests getting yourself checked out for any preexisting skin conditions if your dryness still doesn’t go away.

Final Thoughts

That folks was all we had in terms of our answer to the question: Why is my skin so dry even when I moisturize? We hope our explanation of the causes and solutions for dry skin were adequate and easy to understand and comprehend.

Even after all that, if you still feel like you need further clarification on how you could be inflicted with dry skin, we’d suggest booking an appointment with Holisticare’s excellent dermatology department.

They should also be able to tell you if you have any preexisting skin condition that has extreme dryness as one of its side effects.