Most men blame the cold for the tightness that arrives in autumn, but the bigger change usually happens indoors, the week the heating comes on.
Outside, the air is cold and damp. Inside, the office, the flat, and the train carriage are warm and dry. Your face spends most of the day in the second of those, and it is the second that does most of the drying.
Why heated air is dry air
This part is physics rather than skincare. Cold air can only hold a small amount of water vapour. When a building takes that cold air in and warms it, the amount of water in it stays the same while its capacity to hold water rises sharply. The relative humidity — how full the air is compared with how full it could be — drops.
Air that is far from full pulls moisture from whatever it touches. Washing dries faster on a radiator for exactly this reason. Your skin is one of the things it touches, for eight or ten hours a day.
None of this needs a cold snap to start. The first week the thermostat goes up, usually some time in October, is often the first week the face starts to feel different.
What dry air does to the outer layer of skin
The outermost layer of skin is a thin wall of flattened, dead cells held together by lipids — fats such as ceramides and cholesterol. That wall holds water in, and it stays flexible only while it contains enough of it.
In humid air, water leaves the skin's surface slowly. In dry, heated air it evaporates faster, and the outer layer gives up more of its water than it can easily replace from below. As it dries, it loses its flexibility. That is the tight, slightly papery feeling after a long day at a desk, and the fine flaking around the nose, the eyebrows, and wherever you shave.
Dry skin also tends to be more reactive. A barrier short on water and lipids lets more irritants through, so products that felt fine in August can start to sting in November. Nothing about the product has changed. The skin underneath it has.
The daily cycle that makes it worse
Heated air rarely acts alone. A typical autumn day for a city man runs from a hot shower to cold wind on the walk to the station, a warm and crowded train, an office with the heating on full, and the same again in reverse. Each switch from cold to hot asks the skin to adjust, and the hot shower at either end strips some of the lipids the barrier relies on.
There is also the issue of thirst. In heated rooms people often drink less than they think, because they don't feel hot. It is worth staying reasonably hydrated, but drinking water won't put moisture back into the outer layer of skin on its own. That layer is supplied mainly from what you put on it and how well it holds on to what it has.
What actually helps
The changes are small, and most of them cost nothing.
- Turn the shower down. Lukewarm water cleans just as well without dissolving as much of the barrier's lipids. Keep it short.
- Wash your face gently. A mild cleanser once or twice a day is enough. Anything that leaves the skin squeaky has taken too much with it.
- Moisturise while your face is still damp. A minute or two after washing, not 20. The skin has more water to hold on to at that point, and a moisturiser slows how quickly it escapes.
- Seal water in as well as adding it. Humectants such as glycerin and hyaluronic acid draw water into the skin, but in very dry air they work best with something on top that slows evaporation. A cream does both jobs. The Hydrating Face Cream is built around supporting the skin's natural barrier, which is the part central heating wears down.
- Use more in the evening. Skin loses water more readily overnight, and bedrooms with the radiator on are often the driest rooms in the house. A slightly more generous layer before bed makes more difference than an extra product.
If the air at home feels genuinely parched, turning the bedroom radiator down or using a humidifier can help the room as a whole. Keep any humidifier clean, since a neglected one is worse than none.
What not to do
Resist the urge to scrub the flakes off. Dry skin flakes because the outer layer is short of water, not because there is too much of it. Harsh exfoliation removes some of what is left and makes the skin more reactive.
Equally, there is no need to rebuild your routine every October. The same few products, used a little more carefully and in slightly larger amounts, will usually see you through to spring. An oily T-zone stays an oily T-zone in winter, so a heavier layer on the cheeks and a lighter one down the centre is often the right balance.
If dryness turns into cracking, persistent itching, or red patches that don't settle with a gentle routine, it is worth seeing a GP or dermatologist.