It is crucial to keep your body healthy, including your skin, to live a healthy and happy life. Skin acts like a protective layer to your internal organs. When our skin barrier is strong, it can protect our skin effectively from external stressors and lock moisture. When it becomes damaged, irritants and allergens enter, and water evaporates, leaving your skin drab, dry, and dehydrated. Here’s everything you need to know about your skin barrier and our recommendations for protecting and repairing it if it’s damaged, for example, by using organic skin care products.
What Is Your Skin Barrier?
Consider your skin a brick-and-mortar structure to better comprehend how it operates. Lamellar sheets are structures that supply the skin barrier. These sheets are found between the stratum corneum cells, the topmost layer of skin. These structures resemble the mortar between the bricks in your house’s wall. Lamellar sheets, made up of fatty acids, cholesterol, and ceramides, help keep your skin cells in place and your stratum corneum intact.
What Does It Do?
Skin with a healthy barrier is well-hydrated, moisturized, resilient, and flexible. It can better withstand the adverse effects of environmental stress and ages gracefully. This causes dullness, dryness, and sensitivity and can lead to inflammation and premature aging.
How Does It Become Damaged?
Your skin barrier can deteriorate over time. Aging, external stressors, and regular activities such as over-cleaning all cause cumulative harm to the structure. Remember our parallel with brick-and-mortar stores? Without proper care, the mortar between the bricks deteriorates, and cracks appear. These enable bacteria and irritants into the skin while allowing moisture and hydration to leave.
Here are a few examples of things that can harm your skin barrier:
- Bacteria
- Natural aging
- UV exposure
- Blue light
- Pollution
- Poor diet
- Over-cleansing and over-exfoliating
- Stress
- Harsh chemical skincare
- Extreme temperatures
- Genetic conditions such as psoriasis
What Happens When It’s Damaged?
Transepidermal water loss is one of the principal consequences of skin barrier breakdown. Hydration and moisture escape passively through the weakened barrier, resulting in dryness and dehydration. This exacerbates aging and adds to irritation, sensitivity, and a dull complexion.
Aside from moisture loss, skin with a compromised barrier is vulnerable to environmental assaults such as pollution, UV radiation, and blue light. These three factors contribute significantly to hastened aging, causing the skin to develop fine lines and wrinkles and lose volume and flexibility.
A weaker barrier also allows irritants, bacteria, and allergens into your skin. These can produce irritation, redness, and sensitivity by penetrating the stratum corneum. A compromised barrier can aggravate symptoms of hereditary diseases such as eczema and rosacea.
What are the signs of a damaged skin barrier?
You may notice the following signs of a damaged skin barrier:
- Dryness
- Dehydration
- Flakiness
- Redness
- Irritation
- Fine lines and wrinkles.
How Can You Protect And Repair It?
Now that you know what skin barrier damage does to your complexion, we have solutions to let you know how you can protect and repair it.
-
Apply Sunscreen Daily
The first rule for maintaining a healthy skin barrier is to use sunscreen daily. Professional dermatologists advise wearing sunscreen with an SPF of 30 or more every day and avoiding sun exposure while the UV index is at its peak.
-
Maintain Skin Moisturization
Keeping your skin barrier maintained and hydrated is another approach to protect it. In addition to drinking enough water to keep your skin moisturized internally, you can apply skincare-containing elements that replace and retain your skin’s natural hydration.
-
Choose Organic Skin Care Products.
Synthetic skin care products contain harmful chemicals that can disrupt your skin barrier. Instead of chemical products, always consider organic skincare products that help maintain the strength and elasticity of your skin. Organic products contain ingredients that have beneficial nutrients to optimize health and strengthen skin barriers.
While shopping for skin care products, beware of fake cosmetics masquerading as organic products. These cosmetics may contain ineffective and harmful ingredients that can adversely affect your skin barrier.
-
Look For Antioxidant-Rich Ingredients
Protect your skin from being dry because of environmental stressors by consuming antioxidants in your diet. Antioxidants fight free radicals to minimize the signs of aging caused by oxidative damage.
Additionally, look for vitamin C, birch water, mangosteen, and lilikoi in your skincare products for a potent dose of antioxidants.
Conclusion
Now that you know how critical it is to take care of your skin and its barriers from the above information, here we have the most excellent solution to help care for your skin.
MD Factor offers solutions for men and women 30 and up suffering hair loss, baldness, aging skin, melasma, short lashes, acne, dark eye circles, wrinkles, and sagging skin. They have formulated many products, such as lash MD professional for volumizing the lashes, MD anti-aging creams to get rid of wrinkles, MD hair care products for healthy hair growth, etc.