Professional skin estheticians are often vexed by clients who do not respond to topical products, or, at best respond poorly and suffer dry skin.
These clients exhibit skin that is dry, dry and dry and no matter what, just can’t get anything, including the Big Four actives of Vitamins A, B3, C or the 302 MOLECULE to do much of anything to create systemic skin moisture.
There appears at first and second glance to be no common denominator to this phenomenon. Diet and oral medications are not involved and can be usually ruled out – and normally they are big factors in dry skin.
Topical history can be very light usage to very saturated continuing applications of everything imaginable. What the Skin Dork calls the Dirty Dozen – meaning the average number of products applied per day in Celebrity World – is a common feature of unhappy looking skin.
But, we are not talking that sort of product abused skin, though it may have occurred in the past.
Nor are we talking about a commonly observed outcome: a moisturizer, for example, that does not work for Sara but does wonders for Sandy.
In almost all cases however, these desiccated clients hung out to dry further are older than fifty. Though younger clients increasingly are showing up in the esty waiting room with the same problem.
We have discussed in previous posts the phenomena of thinning skin as we age, ultimately to become an impervious parchment – like external layer that is without elasticity, resilience, bounce or whatever word you prefer and does not respond to products because they can’t penetrate this parchment – including water.
Estheticians note however that the festival of dry, unresponsive skin is not usually so obvious and visual as seen on a fossil and often occurs more often with clients who have not lost their mojo from the ravages of health, age, substance abuse, stress or toxic environmental exposures – at least yet.
Let’s name these sufferers, the DRYS.
The usual approach for the DRYS client is a battery of facials and procedures, products and dietary changes, exercise, various rituals and finding the best chakra for the money.
None of which do much good for the DRYS other than drain the bank account. But, now and then something may light up the skin and looks encouraging, only to fade away sooner than later. The DRYS persist.
Now what?
Take a flashlight and shine under the webbing of skin between your thumb and forefinger. For most of us, the light will shine brightly through. The DRYS however, may not easily see this phenomenon and fossils usually don’t at all (and babies!). It remains a useful rule of thumb (ha ha) test to determine your skin’s biologic age.
Another common factor is the use of topical sunscreens. We will circle back to this favorite rant of the Skin Dork further on, but the DRYS are often sun screen believers, even addicts. The Skin Dork recommends a review of SUNSCREENS.
We know from biology that sunlight is essential for living things, including humans. Light, as we learned during our days being bored to smithereens in physics class, is a term that includes a wide spectrum, from ultraviolet to visible to infrared.
For skincare enthusiasts, avoiding the cell damaging effects of prolonged UV light exposure has become an unassailable doctrine, no matter the evidence that the means now at hand are a worse outcome.
Sunscreens however do not preferentially block only UV light, as much as that seems to be the read on the product label. They also interfere with infrared light.
And infrared light is the key to life itself.
Experiments conducted by bioengineering professor Gerald Pollack at the University of Washington have refreshed the knowledge that light energy, and more specifically infrared light energy is a driving factor in the promotion of essential metabolism for all living things.
And what dear friends do we lack when we observe our fossil friends and the DRYS? Metabolic energy.
Pollack mentions that the energy required to push blood cells around the body is not transmitted solely by the heart. Light energy is also essential. We all emit light, though it is unseen in our visible spectrum (it’s an unseeable blue), but more especially as we move do we create and enhance our aura.
The excited electrons from exercise help to get the flow going – but more importantly the infrared energy of the sun, just as it converts by photosynthesis the metabolic essentials for geraniums, also drives our metabolic energy input/output.
By blocking the sun, we block life itself and the metabolism necessary for skin very acutely. This cannot be compensated for by Vitamin D supplements.
You gotta get out there and preferably bare foot, for grounding to the negatively charged Earth. It’s physics and if you don’t eat your physics, it will eat you.
Well now what’s a mother to do when it is winter in Nome and a naked run under a weak sun won’t do much more than get you frostbite?
Find an infrared light source: an infrared sauna, an infrared lightbulb, an LED infrared/near-and-far device will work great, too. Don’t pay for anything expensive. An infrared equipped esthetician may be a quick and easy choice, too.
After applying your favorite retinol (Skin Dork prefers 302 Skincare’s A 1.0 DROPS mixed with REVIVE to spread or 302 DROPS or 302 SERUM) and smoothing in, kick on the infrared lamp for a few minutes. There is no need to roast yourself, follow the precautions.
For those who like to experiment, try one arm with and one arm without.
This simple, inexpensive technique (note bene: it’s free from Nature) is an excellent way to overcome the DRYS, which at its most fundamental, is a failure of metabolism in the skin.
Do this, set aside the sunscreens (the American Academy of Dermatology doesn’t recommend them, the FDA can’t define what they do therapeutically, so why are you applying these, again?).
Supplement your topical product application with infrared energy and you will feel better, look better and get back to Nature
Go do this. Act like a geranium and soak up that infrared spectrum.
