Winter comes with its benefits — mulled wine! Cute outerwear! Not shaving your legs! — but it also comes with many a downside, especially if your skin is prone to dryness during the colder months. Think itchy skin, dry lips, flakes coming off everywhere, and it kind of comes on so suddenly (i.e. this week) you’re caught scrambling to pivot from your usual skincare routine to a whole different arsenal of products for winter skin.
Well to save you the panic, we’ve rounded up a bunch of must-have winter skin saviours below so you can add to cart and stock up as the cold front hits.
The 10 Best Products For Winter Skin
Night Cream
I can’t rave about this glorious moisturiser enough — it lives up to the “does what it says on the tin” adage because it quite literally keeps your winter skin hydrated for 3 days. To me, that makes it worth the $150 price tag. Recent research by an independent testing company found that this NZ brand’s moisturiser is a whopping 21 times more effective at stimulating the skin’s collagen production than mega-bucks prods like La Mer’s Crème de la Mer, Estée Lauder’s cult treatment Advanced Night Repair and Augustinus Bader’s The Rich Crème. Not bad for a 100% natural product.
Body Scrub
Not sure about you, but my legs look like shrivelled up, flaky gum trees come winter. Don’t even get me started on my arms, which go all bumpy and pink like raw chicken. That’s where this (100% clean!) scrub comes in. I first saw beauty editor Leigh Campbell rave about it (not even in a sponsored way) on her Instagram, so I picked myself up a tube to give it a go. You only use it twice a week, but I swear this works like nothing else. It’s especially good if you want to slather on a gradual tan (spoilers: I’ll recommend one in a jiffy!) in winter and want to avoid telltale patches in your dry bits.
Intensive Moisturiser
Beauty Instagrammer Katie Jane Hughes uses this little gem on the high points of her face in winter, so I obviously copied her and tried it myself. This cream is a miracle worker — great as a base like Katie uses it for, but also for problem areas like random dry patches and the horrible red raw nose you get when you’re blowing your nose a lot. It’s a really natural product too, so your skin will absolutely love it.
Facial Scrub
Obviously, your skin can dry out majorly in winter, so you’ll need to keep exfoliating so those dead skin cells are being sloughed off. But you won’t want to go too hard on your poor delicate winter skin, so a gentle exfoliant like this one is key. This cleansing balm exfoliates, hydrates and brightens all at once, and as a bonus is cruelty-free and totally vegan.
Lip Mask
A good friend of mine, Bree, told me about this lip mask which she absolutely swears by in winter. You don’t even need to use it overnight — in fact, Bree’s hot tip was to pop some on before you brave the elements on your commute to work. By the time you get there, it will have done its gloriously hydrating thing and you can put your lipstick on without risk of it catching it the dry flakes because there aren’t any. This lip mask, which comes in five flavours, is absolute genius.
Hydrating Serum
This Aussie product attacks fine lines and dryness (helloooo, one-two punch) using two types of ultra-hydrating hyaluronic acid, as well as fermented Australian sea kelp and Tassie spring water. You only need four drops for it to get down to business, and when teamed with a nice rich moisturiser, you’ll be laughing.
Gradual Tan
As soon as my body even gets a whiff of winter in the air, it turns a very pale porcelain colour immediately. Which is fine, as I’m mostly covered up in long clothes during winter, but what if it’s a nice-ish day and I want to wear a skirt that shows 10cm of leg? I feel like I can’t because my gams look like sticks of cheese, which is why I use this bad boy to take the edge off the winter skin. I CBF with a full fake tan routine at this time of year, but this gradual tan is really moisturising, so I just switch out the body cream for this a couple of nights a week and wake up looking not so ghostly.
Hair Mask
It’s not just the humidity that wreaks havoc on your hair — I find that in winter my hair gets dry, unruly and needs some serious TLC. Especially because I tend to blast it with heat more often because it’s too cold to let it dry naturally. Enter the super nourishing hair mask from Coco & Eve, which you will have seen all over social media (the marketing manager of this brand knows exactly what they’re doing).
Body Cream
I’ve tried approximately one million body creams over the years and I feel like we all have our go-to’s for slathering on our winter skin. But if you’re currently looking for your MVP, look no further than this classic. I’ve been using this for decades, and there’s nothing quite like it — it’s really rich and moisturising without being oily, doesn’t have a strong, overwhelming fragrance and is perfect if you are prone to sensitive skin. Also, it’s under 10 bucks!
Hydrating Mask
The Neutrogena Hydro Boost range is up there with the best hydrating treatments on the market, and the best part is they are about 1000 times cheaper than similar products. It’s a no-brainer, really. While the entire range is a winter skin must, if I had to pick one it would be the tiny little sleeping mask. It comes in a pod and you just pop it on, go to bed, and voila! you wake up looking plump, dewy and hydrated. Hot tip: Amazon is currently selling it for $4.99, which is basically a cup of coffee.
Image Credit: Emma Lewisham Instagram / Sephora Instagram
