How to Maintain Soft, Supple, Smooth Skin All Year Long

Every woman wants beautiful soft, supple and smooth skin. It can be a real challenge too keep the skin on your smooth and soft all year round. In the summer, your skin can be subject to sunburn and peeling. In the winter the cold outside and the dry heat inside conspire to bless you with alligator skin, cracked, scaly and itchy, with a dry, taut feeling. This even happens to those with over active oil glands. Then there is that other annoying problem. You know the one, the one that is so hard to hide, those rough, darkened knees. Don't despair, there are ways for you to prevent, cure and cover up all of these problems.

The answer to dry, flaky skin at any time of the year is protection. It is moisture that keeps skin soft and supple, and that means adding more liquid moisture, not grease. Pure oil products can help seal in your skin's moisture, but won't add to it. A good skin lotion, however, will not only seal in the moisture already present in your skin, but add moisture of its own. The best lotions for problem skin contain urea.

Always use a body lotion after bathing or showering, and apply it while your skin is slightly moist for best results. Long hot soaks can contribute to dehydrating your skin, so make your baths no-nonsense dips. When you're in the sun, apply a moisturizing sunscreen lotion. Nothing ages skin faster than the sun's ultraviolet rays. At the beach, wind and water adds to the skin drying effect.

If rough, darkened knees are a problem, you can soften and lighten them by first soaking them in warm water, then scrubbing with soap and water and a stiff brush or a loofah sponge. Rubbing with a pumice stone after bathing, while the skin is still soft, will also help. So will one of those lotions, sold at most drug stores, which whisk away dead, dry, discolored skin.

Some natural cosmetic fans recommend and suggest that you use grapefruit or lemon juice for bleaching these areas, but in most cases the bleaching action is too weak to have any noticeable effect. Repeated treatments are needed to create any noticeable change. You may want to consider a bleaching cream instead., one designed to remove hyper pigmentation. Creams containing pigment lightening ingredients such as kojic or licorice extract are effective for brightening up dark areas.

These self pampering techniques will cause your skin to develop and maintain a healthy glow with a smoother surface and texture all year long, and isn't that what you want? Don't you deserve to be pampered? Well get started...

Resource: Gorgeous skin all year long - Health Magazine - June 2007