What causes skin dehydration?Updated a year ago
There are a lot of external and internal factors that can disrupt this natural process and lead to skin dehydration:
- Harsh or excessive cleansing: Cleansing the skin too often or with a cleanser that leaves your skin feeling squeaky or tight immediately after use is a frequent cause of dehydration. Most cleansers are detergent-based, so they work by binding to oils and breaking them down through emulsification. When you rinse away a cleanser, you’re also removing the sebum and intracellular lipids that help the skin retain water, which increases transepidermal water loss.
- Eczema/dermatitis: Dermatitis or eczema are the science-y terms for skin irritation that results in visible rashes or red/scaly patches. When the skin experiences this kind of breakdown, the result is usually higher transepidermal water loss (TEWL), which correlates with dehydration.
- Insufficient water intake: Indeed, not drinking enough water can also impact your skin. The dermis and epidermis both depend on the body’s water content to stay moist, so not drinking enough can lead not just to regular stratum corneum dehydration but deep dehydration.
- Low humidity: When the humidity is low, the skin has a harder time retaining water, so TEWL goes up. Without proper skin care, this greatly increases your chances of dehydration.
- Dry skin: Dryness isn’t the same as dehydration, but the two often come hand in hand. If your skin doesn’t produce much oil, it’ll have a harder time hanging on to moisture which is why those with dry skin are more prone to dehydration.
- Free-radical damage: We tend to focus on the way free-radical damage from sun and pollution exposure can lead to premature aging, but this type of damage can also impede the skin’s ability to retain moisture.
- Age: As we get older, our body’s regeneration capacity slows down, which leads to reduced production of many of the body’s essential components. Those components include lipids and hydrating agents that exist naturally in the various levels of the skin (often called Natural Moisturizing Factors) and ensure hydration.
The skin has a natural ability to retain moisture, thanks to sebum, the intracellular lipid matrix, and natural moisturizing factors that attract water from the lower layers of the skin.
It’s a complex process involving interactions between various components of the skin at different layers, which is why it can be disrupted in so many different ways.