Why do we have drier skin in the winter than in the summer?

We just moved to the Midwest that is totally humid, but during the winter our skin is terribly dry. Why does this happen? Asked by tallwhitegirl 59 months ago Similar questions: drier skin winter summer Health.

Similar questions: drier skin winter summer.

Cold air holds less water. When water evaporates, it is drawn into the air, which "holds" it. (That isn’t exactly the right way to think about it, but it will do for now.) Air can "hold" varying amounts of water.

The warmer and drier the air, the more water it can hold. If the air has as much water it can hold, it is "saturated." If saturated air becomes cooler, the air loses some of its water-holding capacity and it has to lose some water, either as fog or rain or frost or possibly snow.

(If you want to learn more about that, you can look up "dew point" or "relative humidity. ") In the winter, the air can’t hold much water, so the air stays pretty dry. That is okay when you are outside, because even though the air is dry, it can’t draw much water from your skin, since its capacity is low anyway.

(But if it is windy, you can still get pretty dry. ) The big problem is when you go inside, where the cold dry air is warmed up by the building’s heating system. Then the warm dry air has a huge capacity for water, and it sucks the water out of your skin like a leech.

A lot of people run a humidifier during the winter for that reason. Sources: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dew_point, .

Cold v. Warm Air Cold air doesn’t have the ability to contain as much moisture as warm air does. So even though there is tons of moisture in the Midwest, in the winter the air becomes very, very dry resulting in problems with dry skin.

If it really becomes a problem for you, you can get a humidifier (I recommend the warm air ones as opposed to the cold mist ones) or just boil water on your stove. Warm air humidifiers are also nice if you become ill as they will help loosen chest congestion and you can add menthol rub medication (Vicks is the usual brand name, but the generic works just as well), sometimes directly into the water and sometimes to a special tray the steam passes through and it will help even more. But don’t worry, everything will get back to being very humid in a few months.

Sources: 7 years of living in the Midwest Mistral's Recommendations Vicks Warm Mist Humidifier - V-745A Amazon List Price: $28.89 This is the humidifier I have. I like it because the steam goes up, so you don't have to worry about pointing it away from walls and it has a little tray where you can add menthol medication (the type you spread on your chest) if you get a cold.

Midwest answer for a midwest question it holds less moisture. It’s just a fact of nature. When air is cooler, the RELATIVE HUMIDITY will be the same (well- maybe not THE SAME, but reasonable, anyhow), but the ABSOLUTE HUMIDITY will be lower.

When that cold air is heated by your furnace, the RELATIVE humidity will drop... a LOT! The absolute humidity will stay the same (well- maybe not THE SAME, but reasonable, anyhow... actually - if you use gas heat, it’ll be slightly higher, as water is a combustion byproduct of house-heating gases), but the warm air will hold, and hence WANTS to hold, LOTS more moisture, and it will come looking for it anywhere it can FIND it. Your SKIN, for instance.

Your skin has a layer of dead tissue on the outside of it that serves to protect the living tissues underneath. This layer needs moisture... WATER, that is... to remain soft and flexible, but being dead, it doesn't have direct access to the water in your body, and it has to use whatever it can steal from the layer just beneath it. But this process is fairly slow, more like embezzlement than outright theft.

The action of the very-low-relative-humidity air is more like a ravening horde of heavily armed, horse mounted barbarians, so it's the difference in moisture theft that causes the problem. So, as the low-humidity barbarians pillage the moisture right out... errr... OFF of you, the damage that cold weather does to your skin makes it more susceptible to this moisture loss. The moisture loss farther damages the layer of dead skin, opening the way to the still living skin beneath to the barbarians and exacerbating the moisture loss.To help avoid this, a lot of midwest homes have furnaces with built-in humidifiers that blow water into the hot, running furnace.

A problem arises when these blow-in humidifiers run into midwest water, which is frequently taken from limestone-intensive areas, and is thus hard as... well... limestone! The water evaporating from the humidifier leaves behind lime scale, which can build enough up to stop the blower!(Here in south-central Indiana, limestone capitol of the WORLD, a blow-in humidifier can be encrusted into inactivity in a SINGLE WINTER!) Immediately to help your dry skin, use a lotion (try Corn Huskers’ Lotion if you can’t stand the aroma of typical lotions) to replace some of the lost moisture, help prevent cracking and farther damage, and seal in the water/moisture your skin needs to remain flexible. Next, go look at your furnace and see if it has a built-in humidifier, and if it does, is the humidifier working.

If you do NOT have a furnace humidifier, call your furnace maintenance guys and see if they have an add-on unit that they like, and think about... uhhh... adding it on.(If you live in a hard water area, think about a water softener, too. Just on general principals. Lime scale builds up in the damnedest places!

) If your furnace IS so equipped, and it’s not working, call the aforementioned furnace guys and ask about either repair or replacement. If it's there and it's working, tweak it up a bit if things are too dry. A hot or cold water vaporizer in your bedroom will make your nose AND your skin feel better, but they only work for a few hours, and as soon as you get out of bed and head for the bathroom or kitchen, you’ll feel you skin tighten up and dry out.

If worse comes to worst, you can buy a large-area humidifier. These (in my estimation and experience, "horrid," is an appropriate word) things usually consist of a slowly rotating drum covered with a kind of blanket with a fan blowing through it. The drum and blanket rotates through a tank of water in the bottom, then the fan evaporates the water from the blanket and blows it around your house.

Collectively, they collect all kinds of junk from the air, are difficult to clean, are traps for mold and mildew, and take a lot of keeping after (cleaning the blanket and drum, softening and treating the tank water to avoid fungus growth, etc.). Be cautious about this kind of solution and consider it a last-effort kind of thing, but do consider it....and it’s not just your SKIN! Think about the FURNITURE!

Who will PROTECT the FURNITURE! Controlling the humidity in your house will make your skin feel better, and, depending on how low your relative humidity goes during the winter, it may make your wooden furniture last longer too! As wood dries out (due possibly to thirsty, ravenous furnace-heated air molecule-jacking water from wherever it can find it), it shrinks.

The shrunken wood can crack and weaken glue joints, allowing the stresses of use to force the joints apart, causing eventual joint failure and breakage. Hope this helps. Stay warm.

Stay MOIST! Uhhh - wow - that last bit doesn’t look as funny in print as it did in my head.... Sources: Included as hypertext links.

When the heat is on, the relative humidity of the air inside the house falls as it warms This dries your skin no matter what the humidity ouside reads. Cold air cannot hold as much water vapor as warm air even if it has the same relative humidity. So when you warm it, it gets dry.

Try several humidifiers around your house and see. Good luck! .

Cold air is generally dryer than warm air with the air around you being dryer your skin will be dryer as the air around it sucks more moisture from your skin. To counteract this in your home, use a humidifier to keep the humidity levels up during the winter months .

I am looking for jargon winter and summer embroidery kits.

I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.