How Forgetting Moisturizer Changed My Skin

I remember it pretty well-it was July 1997. I was 15 years old. At 15, I already knew that with my dry skin, moisturizer was probably a necessity for my skincare regime on a daily basis. I embarked on a family trip to the Grand Canyon for two weeks, and forgot to pack my bottle of moisturizer. At first, I mentally shrugged and went about my business, enjoying the trip, ignoring what was my normal daily skincare exercise at home. It was a mistake that I dealt with for months after the end of my trip.

After the first three to four days of being moisturizer-free, I started to realize how dry and tight my skin felt. However, it didn’t seem like it was really that big of a problem when our days were jam-packed with excursions in the canyon. At the end of the first week, the minor irritation of having dry skin turned to a major aggravation. I was uncomfortable and my skin was red. Being in the sun in a very dry climate only exacerbated the situation.

Of course, I thought to ask my parents to take me to a drugstore to buy a bottle of moisturizer while we were there, but the solution wasn’t that effortless. We were in the middle of nowhere all of the time, and even spent some of the days camping. To trek the whole family out of our way to find something to satisfy my skincare routine seemed silly to me, and would have probably seemed vain to my two brothers. No one else suffers from the same dry skin as I do, so no one had even bothered to take a bottle of moisturizer on our trip. I also thought that since the trip would be finished soon enough it surely wasn’t something to stress over.

I suffered through for those two weeks without my moisturizer, and my skin certainly paid the price. On the plane home, I took a long look at my arms; they had become scaly and felt more like alligator skin than my own. It was unappealing, and even worse, it hurt. I tried to cure my severe dry skin by jumping back into my daily skincare routine of using moisturizer after my shower, but my skin showed no proof of going back to the way it was. It was as if all the moisture in my skin had been sucked out of me from the dry, hot climate.

I learned my lesson from those two weeks away; never forget to pack moisturizer. I put up with my dry skin for about seven months-it was a continuous itching, scaly, red battle. Being in such a dry spot would probably already wreak chaos on my skin, but being combined without my moisturizer was a definite no-no. Lesson learned: Never forget your moisturizer at home. You skin will be very angry with you, and you’ll swiftly realize how imperative skincare is.

Is there anything else you would like to know about skincare? If you want to learn more about skincare tips and how a moisturizer can assist you, contact Likewise Skincare now!