Inside our #SOSSkin clinic: how to tackle dehydration

Your skincare dilemmas, solved

Welcome to the Marie Claire #SOSSkin Clinic, where we’ll be tackling your biggest skin issues weekly with a big difference - in these videos, we’re asking testers with specific complaints to be searingly honest about how a prescribed regime affects their skin. 

In the first of the series, frequent-flyer Emily Townsend is trialling a trio of hyaluronic-based skincare by Indeed Labs. Her skin is, in her own words: “really, really dehydrated - after I’ve been away the lines around my mouth are more pronounced than usual. I’ve also had quite a few breakouts of spots recently.”

Hers is a classic case of dehydration - while fairly common, dehydration is often missed because it can hide under other skin conditions. You may, for example, think you have oily skin, when actually the oil is a byproduct of skin that's massively out of whack thanks to the underlying dehydration. Dry plus dehydrated also come as a duo - the dry bit being the lack of oil on the surface, while the dehydration is the lack of water in the skin itself. 

Watch the video to see how Emily gets on with the Indeed Labs Hydraluron range, and try following the routine - and the below rules - if you also suffer from dehydrated skin.

The Beauty Desk’s 5 Rules To Tackling Dehydration

Over on the beauty desk, we’ve long combatted bouts of dehydration holistically, trying to follow these rules:

1) Eat Water. Eating water-bearing vegetables like cucumbers and tomatoes rather than just relying on water intake helps rehydrate cells thanks to a slower - and therefore more effective - absorption rate as the body works to grab water out of the vegetables.

2) Upping Essential Fatty Acids. To stay hydrated, cell walls need to be strong enough to hang onto water. Enter Essential Fatty Acids, which will reinforce the cell membrane. As the body can’t manufacture omega 3, we try to pop a Bare Biology Omega 3 Capsule daily. 

3) Spritz Regularly. To nix the feeling of tight skin through pesky trans-epidermal water loss (where water is lost to the atmosphere from skin), we mist a hydrating spray like Pixi Hydrating Milky Mist over make-up throughout the day.

4) Apply Hyaluronic Acid. Able to carry up to 1000 times its molecular weight in water, hyaluronic acid is the ingredient to hit up if your skin is dehydrated. We layer it on morning and evening after cleansing.

5) Mask It. We - like the rest of the beauty world - are a bit obsessed with sheet masks at the moment and especially like using them whenever our skin needs an extra shot of hydration. They work a treat post-flight when skin needs an extra shot of hydration.