icon-account icon-glass

Popular Searches

Popular Products

The Lean Protein
Whey protein powder for weight-loss.
The Energy Booster
Pre/intra-workout powder with BCAAs.

CATEGORIES

Need To Update Your Winter Skincare Routine? Here's How

21st February 2023

Health Nutrition

21st February 2023

By Robyn Schaffer

As November rears its head, it’s probably time to accept that we’re well on our way into the depths of winter.

One of the effects of this change in season is that on our skin; in the winter, our skin is subject to the damage of the cold, snow, ice and rain, as well as the dryness of indoor heating. The result is that moisture is drawn out of the skin, leading to a number of other problems. Good that we've brought out our debut skincare product, The Glow Booster, to help you through... isn't it?

"The combination of moving from artificially heated environments into the cold air has a natural drying effect on the skin," says Amish Patel, an award-winning skin care expert and aesthetics practitioner. "When the air outside is dry and cold, the water in your skin is lost by evaporation more quickly. The result is that our skin is left feeling dry and tight."

But before we get into steps you can take to prevent these issues, let's dive into some of the science behind our skin.

The science behind our skin

The skin is the body’s largest organ and it acts as a protective barrier against the external environment. The outer layer is known as the stratum corneum (SC) and consists of a layer of cells surrounded by lipids (oils) like ceramides, cholesterol, and fatty acids.

Our skin produces less of these oils in the winter months, making it more susceptible to dryness, something that’s also known as winter xerosis (roughness, itching, scaling and flaking).

Additionally, if you wash your hands frequently, this dryness becomes worse as you wash the natural oils and good bacteria from your skin that keep it healthy.

Dry skin tends to be more of a problem in older people because as you age, the skin becomes less able to hold moisture and the number of oil-producing sebaceous glands decreases. However, in the winter there are steps that people of all ages should be taking to ensure maximum protection against the elements. So, here's how to master your dry skin winter routine... 

Exfoliate and moisturise regularly

One of the most important steps that everyone should follow: exfoliate and moisturise. As we age, the process of cell regeneration slows down and so the body is slower to shed dead skin cells and produce new ones. As the old cells pile up, it can leave your skin looking dull, rough and dry, meaning you need to exfoliate. Exfoliation is the removal of dead skin cells on the skin’s surface, and in the winter these increase due to the cold weather drying out the skin on your face and body. If you don’t exfoliate, you can end up with excess oil, clogged pores, and even blemishes. There are a range of different types of exfoliators you can buy, including cleansing scrubs, exfoliating mitts, dry brushes, loofahs and pumice stones, and you should find out which skin type you have before choosing a product that best suits yours.

The key tip for your dry skin winter routine 

After exfoliating, it’s important to moisturise, especially in the colder months, to prevent the skin from becoming chapped, dry and sore. There are different types of moisturiser for different skin types, so again choose one which suits yours. But thicker isn't always better in winter.

Taking care of skin in the winter 


Tammy Richards, a skin and health specialist at Pure Optical, adds: "A common misstep that I frequently witness is people drenching the skin in thick moisturiser as winter approaches. Just because a cream is thick, doesn't mean it will combat dryness. Reach for products that contain hyaluronic acid, a substance that can hold 1000 times its weight in water and is great for retaining moisture in the skin."

Cut down on long, hot baths and showers

Winter skin dryness is a real problem that so many of us struggle with. We know it gets chilly in the winter and sometimes there’s nothing better than a long, hot bath or shower to take the feeling of impending frostbite away, but it’s possible to have too much of a good thing. Yes, really. Sorry.

An excess of hot water coming into contact with your skin can strip it of important oils, so where possible use cool or lukewarm water when washing your hands and face and save the hotter water for when you really feel like you need it. If you're someone who really can't forego your hot baths and showers though, try adding oils to your bath or use oil-based shower products to retain as much moisture as possible.

Invest in a humidifier 

Taking care of skin in the winter can be hard, but investing in a humidifier could make this a little bit easier.

During the winter, the air becomes drier and lacks the moisture that keeps our skin soft and supple. So, to maximise the amount of water and moisture in the air around you, it could be worth investing in a humidifier for your home and placing it in a room that you spend a lot of time in, like your bedroom.

Richards says: "A humidifier that emits water vapour or steam will add moisture to the air and work to curb dry skin. You should consider one of these if you're working from home and are likely to sit with the heating on all day."

Besides keeping the skin moisturised, humidifiers can also help ease symptoms of a cold or other respiratory conditions. However, it’s important to keep your humidifier clean, because if not, they can breed mold or bacteria and transmit this into the air around you.

Wear SPF (yes, even in winter) 

This is a rule that applies throughout the entire year and just because it’s not hot or sunny outside in the winter doesn’t mean you can skip on the SPF. The sun is powerful all year round, even through cloud, so it’s key to use at least an SPF 30+ on exposed skin before going outside. Without it, your skin will be more exposed to the sun’s UV rays which dry out the skin, leading to problems such as sunburn and signs of early ageing. But beyond helping keep the skin moisturised, SPFs have a number of other benefits including keeping your complexion even, reducing signs of premature ageing, and even reducing the risk of cancer. 

Put the right foods in your body

Besides paying attention to what’s in the air and environment around you, it’s also important to take note of what you’re putting inside your body when it comes to your skin this winter. There’s a direct connection between your gut and your skin health, so experts recommend increasing your daily intake of healthy fats to help with dry skin. Foods you can incorporate into your diet for this purpose include things like walnuts, olive oil, and avocados.

You can also take advantage of ingestible skin supplements like The Glow Booster - which provide you with skin boosting ingredients from the inside out to make sure you're getting that glow on point from all angles.

In the meantime, you may want to cut down on things like alcohol and caffeine; as diuretics, these will cause dehydration. "Drinking caffeinated tea, coffee and alcohol can all dehydrate the body and this will have an impact on your skin, so keep drinking water," Patel says. "If you can't bear drinking cold drinks in the winter, try hot water with decaffeinated herbal tea bags instead."

By combining these steps you'll be on your way to glowing winter skin in no time. Tried any of these tips? Let us know in the comments below how you got on, we’d love to hear from you!

< Older post Newer post >

Need Expert Advice?

Take the quiz

Take the quiz

If you're not sure where to start, take our 5 minute health consultation to get product recommendations tailored to your goals.
Read more

Other Insights

I've Been Taking Creatine Every Day For Six Years

I've Been Taking Creatine Every Day For Six Years

Something happens in March. The people who started strong in January, the ones with the new routine, the new kit, the renewed sense of purpose, are now splitting into two groups. The ones who've lost momentum. And the ones asking sharper questions. Not "what should I take?" but "what actually works?" Creatine keeps coming up. And every time it does, I notice the same pattern: people either swear by it without really understanding why, or they assume it's something bodybuilders use and leave it alone.I've been taking it every single day for six years. So let me tell you what I actually know. Why I started I didn't start taking creatine for the reasons most people assume. I wasn't trying to get bigger. I was training consistently, eating well, and hitting a wall. That frustrating place where effort stops translating into progress. A friend with a sports science background told me creatine was the most researched supplement in existence. More peer-reviewed studies than almost anything else on the market. That got my attention. So I started. And I kept going. What I noticed The first week, nothing dramatic. But over the following three to four weeks, something shifted. I could push a little harder. An extra rep. Slightly more on the bar. Training sessions that didn't end in the usual flat feeling of having nothing left. Those are marginal gains. They don't feel significant in the moment. But they compound. Over months, they're the difference between a plateau and real, measurable progression. The one time I stopped, about two years in, during a stretch of heavy travel where I got lazy about it, I felt the absence more than I expected. Not immediately. But within a few weeks, training felt duller. Less sharp. I put it back in and haven't looked back since. I also noticed something I hadn't anticipated: my thinking felt clearer on the days I trained hard. I assumed it was the exercise. I later learned creatine may have had something to do with that too. What creatine actually does Most people think of creatine as a muscle supplement. That's not quite right. What creatine does is help your body regenerate ATP, adenosine triphosphate, more efficiently. ATP is your cells' primary energy currency. It's what your muscles burn during intense effort. But it's also what your brain runs on. Here's the mechanism: during high-intensity exercise, your body depletes ATP rapidly. Creatine stored in muscle tissue, in the form of phosphocreatine, allows you to replenish that ATP faster. That's why creatine consistently improves performance in short, explosive efforts: weightlifting, sprinting, high-intensity intervals. But the same ATP recycling process happens in the brain. A growing body of research suggests creatine may support cognitive performance, particularly under conditions of stress or sleep deprivation. A 2021 study published in Scientific Reports found meaningful improvements in memory and cognitive function following supplementation. It's not a nootropic in the trending sense of the word. But the evidence is real, and it applies to more people than the gym crowd. The effective dose is well established: 3 to 5 grams per day, taken consistently. No loading phase required. No cycling. Just daily consistency, and that's where most people go wrong. What the industry does instead Creatine monohydrate has been around for decades. That's a problem for brands that need something new to sell. So new formats appear. Creatine HCL. Buffered creatine. Kre-Alkalyn. Creatine ethyl ester. Creatine gummies. Each one marketed as superior: faster absorbing, more bioavailable, easier on the stomach. The evidence doesn't support it. Multiple head-to-head comparisons, including a widely cited review in the Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition, found no meaningful performance advantage for alternative creatine forms over monohydrate. In some cases, the alternatives perform worse per gram of active compound. In the case of creatine gummies, several brands including some very large ones have been shown not to contain the creatine concentrations they claim on the label. What you actually want is simple: a clinically relevant dose of creatine monohydrate, taken every day. That's it. What I use The Power Booster is 100% pure creatine monohydrate, nothing added, nothing unnecessary. Five grams per serving, which sits right at the evidence-supported daily dose. It's not complicated because it doesn't need to be. The science on creatine monohydrate is already settled. The job is just to take it consistently. (If you have a friend still on the fence about creatine, forward this their way. It's one of those rare supplements where the evidence is clear enough to just recommend without caveats.)
Read more
The Ingredient We Almost Didn't Put In The Energy Booster

The Ingredient We Almost Didn't Put In The Energy Booster

There's a question we ask about every ingredient before it goes into a product. Not "is this trending?" Not "does it look good on the label?" Just: does the evidence actually support putting this in? Most of the time, that question is straightforward. Either the research is there or it isn't. But occasionally you land on an ingredient where the science says yes and something else gives you pause. That's where formulation gets genuinely interesting. Beta alanine was one of those decisions. What Beta Alanine Actually Does Most people who've taken a pre-workout have felt beta alanine without knowing it. It's the ingredient responsible for the tingling sensation you get in your face, your neck, your hands. That feeling has a name: paraesthesia. It's harmless. But it's also the reason we nearly left beta alanine out. Before I get to that, the science. Beta alanine is a non-essential amino acid. On its own, it doesn't do very much. But inside muscle tissue, it binds with another amino acid called histidine to form something called carnosine. And carnosine is where the real work happens. During intense exercise, your muscles produce hydrogen ions as a byproduct of energy production. It's the build-up of those hydrogen ions, not lactic acid as most people think, that causes the burning sensation and the drop-off in performance. Carnosine acts as a buffer. It mops up those hydrogen ions and delays the point at which fatigue kicks in. The research on this is substantial. A 2012 meta-analysis published in the journal Amino Acids, covering over 40 studies, found that beta alanine supplementation consistently improved exercise capacity, particularly in high-intensity efforts lasting between one and four minutes. The effect size was meaningful and reproducible. This wasn't a promising pilot study. It was a decade of accumulated evidence pointing in the same direction. In practical terms: more reps before failure. More output before you hit the wall. Sustained performance over a longer window. So why the hesitation? The decision we almost got wrong The tingling. Not because it's dangerous. It isn't. The paraesthesia from beta alanine is a well-understood pharmacological response and there is no evidence of harm at the doses used in supplementation. But we had a real concern: if someone takes The Workout Blend for the first time and feels an unexpected tingling in their face, and nobody told them it was coming, we've just lost their trust. Possibly permanently. The easy path was to leave it out. Plenty of pre-workout formulas do exactly that, either because they're being cautious or because they want a smoother consumer experience. No ingredient, no explanation required. We talked about it a lot. And the conclusion we kept coming back to was this: removing an ingredient with strong evidence because it might confuse people is not how we want to make formulation decisions. That's the same logic that leads brands to include ingredients with weak evidence because they're more familiar, more comfortable, more sellable. The answer wasn't to remove it. The answer was to be upfront about it. The tingling means the beta alanine is working. It's a real physiological response to a real ingredient doing a real thing. If we believe in the science, we include the ingredient and we explain what's happening. That felt like the right standard to hold ourselves to. What the rest of the market does Most pre-workout formulas fall into one of two categories.The first is the stimulant-heavy formula. Stacked with caffeine at doses that produce a short spike, a noticeable crash, and not much else underneath. These sell well because the immediate sensation of energy feels like evidence that something is working. It often isn't, not in any meaningful physiological sense beyond what caffeine alone would do. The second is the proprietary blend. A long list of ingredients with no disclosed amounts, making it impossible to know whether any of them are present at doses that match the research. Proprietary blends let brands list an ingredient without committing to a dose that would actually work. Both approaches optimise for perception. Neither optimises for performance. What I'd recommend The Energy Booster (soon to be renamed to The Workout Blend) contains beta alanine alongside citrulline malate, which supports nitric oxide production and blood flow during training, BCAAs at a 2:1:1 ratio to safeguard lean muscle, and natural caffeine from guarana for sustained energy without the spike you get from synthetic sources. The formulation is built around what the research supports at doses that match the evidence. If you feel the tingling the first time you take it, that's the beta alanine. It's normal, it fades within 20 minutes or so, and it's a sign the formula is doing what it's supposed to do.
Read more