Dry skin is caused by two factors. One is the damage to the skin's protective barrier which produces excessive water loss through the skin. The other is a great reduction in the concentration of the skin's water-holding sugar and protein molecules, the complex proteoglycans and glycosaminoglycans (GAGs) molecules.

Many skin moisturizers and emollient products sold by the major skin care producers delay the healing process of irritated and damaged skin and make the situation worse by inhibiting natural skin repair. New computer instruments have demonstrated that several popular moisturizers augment skin damage in ways comparable to skin irritants. Nor are skin barrier creams an answer, such as those containing petrolatum and lanolin.

What our skin requires is to shield its surface and to heal the skin from the inside out, by putting the skin in a situation in which innate skin repair can occur.

Most if not all the popular moisturizers and emollients currently sold by the main skin care producers contain elevated proportions of detergents and detergent-like chemicals, ignoring many years of sound evidence that such detergents degrade the skin's innate protective function and harm the skin. Also, several of the dyes and optical diffusers used to give the appearance of healthy skin are harming to skin.

Dry Skin Treated Naturally

Lipids and fats in the skin confer the epidermal defense to transcutaneous water loss. These lipids in the upper skin area called the stratum corneum are disposed in layers called lamellae. The lower skin layers have more typical fats such as triglycerides and phospholipids while the upper layers have more ceramides, cholesterol and free fatty acids.

Waxes and oils seal the skin's surface and avoid excess water loss. Cosmetic moisturizers loosen the skin's protective barrier and hydrate (wet) the skin proteins but have the long-term effect of harming the skin.

A skin-care product is only as good as what it contains and how those ingredients can aid your skin work better. In fact, moisturizers (or any skin-care product claiming to have an effect on skin repair, wrinkles or sagging skin) should definitely contain an elegant combination of antioxidants, cell-communicating components, and intercellular elements as they help skin keep a healthy level of hydration, build collagen and avoid cellular damage.

Not the popular dry skin creams that have been in the market since the 1920's, when the cosmetic industry begun to sell oil/water/detergent creams for moisturizing instead of the herbal oils that had been employed for hundreds of years. This was comparable to the fallacious campaigns, we may all remember, that aimed to stop women from breast feeding their babies and promoted their replacement with artificial infant formulas sold for profit.