Yes, its time to cheer that we are heading out of Winter and into Spring but our skin will be feeling the effect of winter for a while yet.

Many good things come with getting older; but unfortunately increasingly supple skin isn’t one of them!

You don’t have to be older to have dry skin but as we age, our skin naturally becomes drier. The cells in our body are coated in a fatty acid which holds the moisture in our cells. This fatty acid starts to thin as the years tick by and also dries out and in the cooler months – dealing with low humidity exacerbates age-related dryness.

Boost your intake of essential fatty acids

Making the right food choices to keep your essential fatty acid intake up is important – there’s a reason they’re called ‘essential’

Whipping up salad dressings with nut oils such as olive, macadamia, walnut, hemp or avocado oil is a simple way to incorporate healthy fats into your diet. So is filling your plate with fatty fish, nuts and seeds like macadamias and walnuts.

Many of these are also high in magnesium which is needed to help keep the moisture in our skin and body.

Sip your way to hydration

A trick I love in the colder months is adding a piece of mandarin peel to a cup of hot water and letting it sit a little while. It adds a lovely citrus flavour.

Or opt for tea. A cup of herbal tea won’t only warm you up, the right blend of herbs can have good health benefits too!

Serve up soups

Chunky soups, stews and broths are an excellent way to increase the amount of hydration and nutrients to drier, ageing skin.

These days people call it bone broth, when we did our Chefs apprenticeship it was called Beef Stock or Chicken Stock :} but regardless of what its is called there are great benefits of making a stock and using it in your soups & stews. It is the cooking method which helps to leach the nutrients from the bones and the slow reduction gives it a depth of flavour and benefits and one benefit is collagen.

There are different collagens needed for different actions but making a soup or stew with a home made stock will help boost your collagen production and maintain skin quality.

Vegetable stock does not contain collagen but like all home made stocks it is wonderful for gut health. (we will talk gut health and its affect on the skin in upcoming blogs)

Try to avoid pre packaged soups. They’re usually sky high in salt and cause fluid retention which is different from hydration.

Food as skincare

Skincare that are derived from ingredients mentioned in the foods that are hydrating. We tend to forget that a large amount of what we put onto our skin is absorbed so using ingredients that are known to be high in essential fatty acids will help keep your skin & cells hydrated. They can be hemp oil, avocado oil, olive oil, hyaluronic acid.