Humidity & Beauty

Humidity - The Foundation For Beautiful Skin

Balancing humidity in your environment is essential to maintaining optimal skin tone.   Your personal beauty is integrally linked to skin condition and hence to humidity.    The adage "beauty is skin deep" carries a ring of truth when set in this perspective.

Ardis   suffering from dry flaking skin on both her hands and face.   She was told by her dermatologist that in order to relieve her symptoms she would need to liberally administer moisturizing creams to the affected areas.

It is no secret.   Our bodies are primarily composed of water - approximately 70% with some body cells being composed of more than 90% water.    At the date of our birth we enter a new, dryer environment which continues to cause stress on our bodies for the duration of our lives.   There is a constant tension in life.   Our environment draws water out of our bodies through respiration and evaporation from our skin and eyes - a process known as dehydration.  

When a proper balance between the forces of dehydration and re-hydration is maintained, the body achieves a relative state of harmony with its environment.   This condition is generally reflected in the quality of your skin tone.

Your primary presentation of beauty being the face and hands (and more specifically your skin tone) provide important clues about your overall health and how well you are maintaining the moisture balance with your environment.   When the body is healthy and properly hydrated, your face and hands radiate this quality.   Similarly, your hair will reflect proper care that you give it.   Hair that is properly balanced with respect to hydration and essential oils will reflect a similar beauty.   Together they create a portrait of beauty.

As dehydration through evaporation removes water from our skin cells, they diminish in size and flatten out.   During periods of continual dryness the body may loose its ability to fully re-hydrate itself.   This condition speeds up the aging process and has a large part to play in appearance of lines, wrinkles and lacklustre skin.  

The body automatically responds by attempting to replenish this water loss.   You assist this process by ingesting foods which contain water, drinking and assisting the body to conserve water.   You protect your body by lathering with moisturizing skin creams which serve to reduce evaporation, applying / ingesting essential oils, using protective clothing against damaging conditions like strong sunlight, wind, cold / heat.   Including more vegetable oils (fatty acids) in your diet and drinking a lot of water assists in counteracting this process.   However, this may still not be enough to regain the moisture balance that your body needs to maintain skin tone that is soft, smooth and supple .

Moisture balance and skin moisture needs vary among individuals depending on texture, skin elasticity, skin circulation, moisture, oils, cell structure, thickness, underlying muscle tone, etc .   Beyond controlling diet and protecting your skin through application of essential oils, moisturizing creams and misting, there is more that can be done.   Whenever possible you also need to control the moisture within your environment - your HUMIDITY LEVEL.

YOUR ENVIRONMENT

Stress that your body and skin experiences depends in large measure upon the temperature and relative humidity of your environment.   The dryer and warmer the air, the faster evaporation takes place at the skin.   As this takes place it becomes more and more difficult to maintain a proper hydration balance and quickly your body slides into a water deficit.   Too much moisture in the air is not healthy and brings about other challenges to maintaining personal beauty - perspiration, hair body, discomfort, etc.   From an overall health perspective you will want to maintain your indoor humidity level at between 30%-50%.   From the perspective of personal beauty and balancing skin moisture choose a humidity level between 45%-55%.

HOW CAN YOU MEASURE THE HUMIDITY IN YOUR HOME

Purchase a quality hygrometer to measure the relative humidity in various parts of your home or office. You will soon be associating aspects of your personal beauty and health with this new information.   Many of the symptoms associated with your beauty and health may be addressed by adjusting the level of humidity within your personal environment.

 

DEHYDRATION SYMPTOMS

•   Tight skin sensation - hands, face
•   Dry eyes
•   Headache
•   Fatigue
•   Itching skin - hands, face
•   Chapped lips
•   Extreme thirst
•   "Unfresh" feeling
•   Difficulty breathing
•   Poor sleep - difficulty breathing while sleeping, disturbed sleep
•   Dry, encrusted nasal passages
•   Dry, irritated throat
•   Fingernails keep breaking

EFFECTS OF DEHYDRATION ON YOUR SKIN

(Especially prolonged moisture loss from facial skin)

• Blood capillary walls below your skin surface become thinner.
• Skin becomes paler.
• Skin pores have a tendency to enlarge
• Age spots and blemishes tend to become more prevalent (increased melanin concentrations)
• Skin becomes more susceptible to bruising and sunburns (The dermal and epidermal layers become thinner)
• Oil / moisture balances may be changed resulting in oilier complexion or become dry and flaky.
• Skin becomes more prone to infections, rashes, blemishes and age spots.
• Skin loses flexibility

Author: Stan Pankratz has been an instructor at the University of Calgary and is an independent consultant with Strategic Learning Coaches and Consultants International.   Please forward your comments to him using the following email:   stan.pankratz@slcci.com .

COMMENTS:

Why do the British have peaches and cream skin?
MOISTURE !
Humidity makes the difference.

"I live in the UK... though my wife and I are from Canada. I would never have thought about the link between beauty and humidifiers prior to you pointing this out. My wife commented that her skin is considerably softer than her Canadian sisters (which they have noted as well) and she attributes this to the moisture / humidity in Britain." Mike