Spring's here and your skin hasn't noticed yet

The calendar turns to spring this week, and there's a fair chance your skin hasn't caught up. The flaky patches on your shins are still there. Your forearms still feel papery. You've been putting moisturiser on since June and it keeps vanishing within the hour, soaking in like water into blotting paper.

That's not you doing something wrong. It's the tail end of three months of cold air, hot showers and indoor heating, and it takes a while to undo.

What winter actually leaves behind

Two things happen over a cold season. The first is on the surface. Dead skin cells that would normally shed on their own start to pile up, held in place by dryness. That's the dull, slightly rough feel across shins, elbows and upper arms. Moisturiser sitting on top of that layer never really gets anywhere.

The second happens underneath. Every hot shower takes off a little of the oily film your skin makes to hold water in. In winter you have more showers, hotter, with less time in between for the skin to rebuild what it lost. By the end of August that film is thin.

Warm days on their own won't fix either problem. The extra humidity does help, since dry indoor air drives a lot of winter itch. But the build-up and the missing oils still need a hand.

Why it takes longer to bounce back after fifty

This part is worth knowing, because it explains a lot of frustration.

Skin's oil glands slow down as we age. Researchers put the drop at roughly a quarter per decade from around the mid-thirties. At the same time, the fats sitting between your skin cells — the ceramides, cholesterol and fatty acids that work like mortar between bricks — start to thin out. Older skin can carry around a third less of them than young skin does. For women, the change through menopause speeds that along again.

So the same winter that leaves a thirty-year-old a bit itchy leaves you cracked at the ankles by August. There's less in reserve, and rebuilding takes longer. Nothing has gone wrong. You just have to put back more than you used to.

Shifting into spring without stripping anything

Three things worth doing over the next fortnight. None of them complicated.

Lift the build-up off gently. Not with a gritty scrub. A sisal soap pouch with your usual bar inside it does the job — work up a lather and the fabric gives a light polish while you wash. Once or twice a week on legs and arms is plenty. Leave it alone if the skin is cracked or angry.

Turn the shower down. It's warmer out now. You don't need the water as hot as you did in July, and every degree you drop is oil left where it belongs.

Feed it while it's damp. Balm on bone-dry skin mostly sits there. Balm on skin that's still slightly wet from the shower traps that water underneath it, which is exactly where you want it.

What we'd reach for

For washing, look for a bar with a decent superfat, which means extra fats left in the bar that never turned into soap and stay behind on the skin. Our Gentle Soothing Soap Bar is unscented at 6% superfat, and it's the one we post out most often to people whose skin reacts to everything. If you like a bit of scent, Just Tallow Lavender is the same base with lavender essential oil through it.

For afterwards, our Whipped Tallow Coconut Body Butter in Roman Chamomile has no water in it at all, so there's nothing to evaporate away and leave you dry again an hour later. A small amount worked into damp shins goes further than you'd think. Grass-fed tallow has a fatty acid make-up close to the fats human skin produces, which is a good part of why it sinks in rather than sitting on the surface.

If your hands and forearms are the worst of it, the Calm & Comfort Soap Bar at the kitchen sink makes a noticeable difference over a couple of weeks, simply because that's where most of the washing happens.

Give it a fortnight

Skin turns over slowly, and more slowly the older we get. Two weeks of gentler washing and something rich going on afterwards is usually enough to see the difference on your shins. By the time the garden needs you in October, you'll be in much better shape for it.

Everything we make comes out of a small kitchen at Fulham Homestead in Victoria, in batches small enough that we know what went into each one. Have a look through the range and see what suits.