Given the current economy, coupled with bitter, windy weather and drying heaters and radiators, it’s no wonder our skin is in serious need of TLC. Below, Dr. Ellen Marmur, the Chief of the Division of Dermatologic and Cosmetic Surgery at the Mount Sinai Medical Center New York, provides skin-saving at-home tips – perfect for the cold winter months when our stress levels seem to reach their peak:

”At home facials once a week in the winter will help reduce dead skin build-up and a dull complexion,” says Dr. Marmur. “Make it yourself – blend one avocado, juice from half of a lemon, and the contents of a lemon-zinger tea bag. Apply to face for 10 minutes, wash with gentle face wash like Terralina, and immediately moisturize with your favorite face/neck cream, massaging for 5 minutes.”

The number one tip for extremely dry or irritated skin: “don’t scrub or pick inflamed skin, and don’t wash with harsh soaps!” says Dr. Marmur. “Number two: apply a thick ointment, such as Aquaphor (available at drug stores), to your neck, chest and hands before bed for at least one hour. Either gently wipe off with a soft towel, or wash with a gentle face wash like Terralina,” advises Dr. Marmur. “Apply aloe lotion (not gel) and your favorite moisturize – and make it chemical free.”

Remember to use a humidifier in your home, especially in your bedroom, to protect against the drying effect of heaters.

“Winter skin is very dry, rough and red. Simplify your skincare routine and focus on protection — moisturize, avoid extremes of cold, heat, wind, and use gentle products that are chemical free.”

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Since that show, Oprah fans have been flooding the internet with questions:

Does is it really work? (Where can I get some???) Are there any side effects?

One product is NeoCell’s Super Collagen Powder. A scoop mixed with water or juice and taken twice a day is the ticket to healthy, beautiful skin – the same way that was shown on Oprah.

“A daily ‘collagen cocktail’ is one of the easiest, most effective and least costly ways of improving the way skin looks and feels,” said NeoCell Vice President of Sales, Darren Rude. “There’s no need for needles or Botox, just a simple drink twice a day. Many of our customers say they see results in just a couple of weeks.”

Collagen is a fibrous protein and serves as a building block for skin, cartilage, ligaments, and other connective tissues in the body. As people age, the body produces less collagen at a time when it needs it most – such as repairing skin damaged by years of sun exposure. This is why collagen supplements like Super Collagen Powder are important – they help the body repair itself.

Could this actually be true??? I’m scooping as we speak…

Photo credit: NeoCell

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Tracy asks me: I used Sun-in lightener about 3 weeks ago, with not a lot of effects. After 3 weeks I used a semi permanent color, and my hair is now pitch black (was light brown). Is there anything I can do?

What happened? Your hair was extremely dry and porous after using the Sun In, and it soaked up a lot more hair color than it was supposed to.

How do I fix this? You have a few options here – none of them are particularly fun or easy – try them as soon as you can after your color job, the longer that color is in your hair, the harder it will be to remove, just like a stain in your clothing. First, try to find Prell Original shampoo. This is the only one that will work. Wash your hair in the hottest water you can stand, as many times as you can until when you shampoo and rinse, your water is totally clear. If you can’t find Prell Original, try Tide laundry detergent. The last resort method is: you can buy some powdered bleach and 20 volume peroxide (this is what comes in bleach kits at the drugstore), and mix them in with your shampoo (use a bottle). Use about 3 tablespoons of shampoo, 1 tablespoon each of bleach and peroxide. Shampoo it in GENTLY, don’t rub too much, just distribute it through your hair and leave it on for about 10 minutes then rinse out and repeat your shampoo (without bleach). Do NOT do this with Prell. Use your regular shampoo.

After all of this, your hair is gonna look and feel awful. Condition it WELL. Very well – several times over a few days if you can do it. Use something really good and deep like Paul Mitchell Hair Repair or Biolage Cera-Repair, leaving it in for a few hours or even overnight. After that, you can work on evening out your color again. Choose something a shade or two lighter than what you want, and you can mix it half with water/half with peroxide. The purpose of this is to even it out the best you can without causing any more grabbing to occur.

How can this be prevented in the future? Moisturize, moisturize, moisturize! We all do damaging things to our hair that can make it more dry and porous. Simple everyday things like blowdrying and straightening and curling will do it. Even lots of wind can blow the moisture right out of your hair. Use products to protect your hair from heat styling, condition it regularly with a moisturizing conditioner (as opposed to the repairing conditioners listed above), and if you are planning on coloring it, a few days before you do, be sure and really deeply condition it. If you are impulsive like me, and decide you want a new color and you want it NOW, mix up a spray bottle with a medium viscosity mixture of conditioner and water, and mist it onto the dryer parts of your hair – most likely the top layer which is exposed to the elements, and the ends of your hair. If your hair is porous, it will grab onto the conditioner and there won’t be any room in the hair shaft for the color to grab.

Just for grins and giggles, this tendency of hair to “grab” can be used for good. My hair used to be the color of Pink’s in the above picture (yeah, way back in the glorious 80’s!). I used a temporary hair dye to do it, but first I bleached my hair out so light that it was so porous that it grabbed that pink color, so it became a permanent fixture. Well, until my grandmother passed away and I had to try to cover it up for her funeral, but thats another color story for another day.

I sure hope that is helpful Tracy, and anyone else who may have dealt with this. I sure have, and I sure know lots of other folks who have as well, so don’t feel alone.

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Is it true that Paul Mitchell products (and other ‘designer’ hair products) sold at grocery stores and big discount stores are NOT the same formulas that sell in beauty salons? Or is that all hype?

This is called diversion, and is a major problem within the industry. Most of the time the product is authentic, but it is occasionally is counterfeit (flea markets, mostly). The most likely problem with these products is that they are old, but the effects of that are negligible. Really, from an ethics standpoint, you shouldn’t buy these products from anywhere but a licensed salon – by supporting diversion you are undercutting your favorite salon, and they need your business to survive. Wouldn’t you hate life if all you had to choose from were large chain salons? I know I would. There is a huge black market on salon products that you wouldn’t believe, and when you see these in your grocery stores, you can also be fairly sure that the store owner is using shady methods to get these products, which makes me wonder where else they are cutting corners or getting stuff under the radar (meat? eww). You will most likely not save much money if any, and the manufacturer will not stand behind the products when purchased that way either. There is a short, but sweet, article on diversion here, if you want to read a lttle more about it.

Great question, Gail. BTW, I do love your questions, please feel free to email them to me at christina@b5media.com, or leave them in the comments. I will do the best I can to get them answered for you!

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I do like glazes, and especially like that they fatten up my super baby-fine hair so that I get a little more cooperation in the styling department. But I have a question–in cases like mine, where one has both high and low-lights, what glaze color should you go with if there isn’t no-color, clear glaze offered? The glaze that matches your lightest color, so it won’t mask your darker tones?

Suzzann, yes, when doing temporary or semi-permanent color, especially to touch up and brighten color to extend the life of your color job for a couple more weeks, always go with the color that matches, or is a bit lighter than, your lightest color. This will brighten up your whole head of hair, give you some shine, and will not cover up what your colorist has worked so hard to achieve. Especially when you are dealing with things like highlights AND lowlights in your hair.

You should also consider the base tones in your hair. If you are unsure whether your hair has a yellow, ash or platinum base color, be sure and choose a glaze that is labelled neutral so you don’t wind up covering up the gold in your hair, or make your ash based color too brassy. I will talk a little more about those this week if you don’t quite understand what all of that means, so keep an eye out for that.

For now, always match the lightest color in your hair with a glaze for results you will be happy with! Thanks for the question Suz.

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There are other factors that can really affect your skin from the inside, the biggest one is nutrition. And I don’t mean that eating chocolate or pizza is going to give you zits. If that were true, boy, I would have been a big ol’ pit of them way before I was! If you are not eating a well rounded diet, your skin can suffer for it. Drinking plenty of water will make a difference as well. I have been doing a book study on Dr. Andrew Weil’s 8 Weeks to Optimum Health, and honestly, the biggest difference I have seen in my health is a miraculous change in my skin. I really do recommend you look into your diet (and maybe some supplementation if it is not quite as well rounded as it should be) as being a factor that could really help your skin out. I’m going to talk a little more specifically about that in future posts, so keep an eye out!

Now, getting to the oil control issue. There are topical products out there that are supposed to help oil production during the daytime, that are applied before your makeup. The one I use is by BeautiControl, but there are others, such as the one pictured, Oil Control Lotion, by MAC. Follow that with a foundation for oily skin. Almost every cosmetic line has those. You will probably have to test several before you find one you like, but I use one sometimes by Ultima II, but it is a bit heavy, so I save it mostly for evening wear. I also use a Wet/Dry Powder foundation that I can touch up during the day if I need to.

One more tip: Loose powder is better to use for oily skin than compact powder, because compact powder contains oils itself that are holding the powder together, and as a result does not absorb as much oil as the loose variety. Hopefully, using some of these tricks will keep you from having to apply powder all day long to control the shine!

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Tisco left a question for me: Can you give any suggestions as to what I can use to get rid of my acne? I have an oily face but it is really very dry after I wash it in the morning. During the day, I need to apply powder again as it becomes very oily. Would be grateful for your suggestions.

Believe it or not, acne and dry skin can really go hand in hand. Very basically, what happens is that when you wash your face with harsh products designed to clear up your skin, you chemically remove and wash away your natural oils, leaving your skin very dry and unprotected. These natural oils are also somewhat protective in that they will actually inhibit bacteria from entering your skin and subsequently causing infection. And on top of this, the more oil you remove, the more your skin thinks it needs to produce to make up for the loss. So, you do not want to get rid of that entirely.

There are a zillion products out there for acne prone skin, but without knowing what you have tried, and at the risk of sounding like a TV commercial, I have to say that I really am one of those die hard fans of Proactiv Solution. If you haven’t tried it yet, I really suggest you do. I have had adult acne problems since my son was born 8 years ago and major oil problems on top of that since moving to Texas 3 years ago, and as long as I use it, I stay in pretty good shape. My skin never feels dry and my blemish problems are kept to a bare minimum. I haven’t heard many people say that Proactiv was too harsh on their skin, but there are some. If anyone else has favorite acne related products, I would sure appreciate you leaving them in the comments section so maybe Tisco can get a few more good product suggestions! I also feel like my recent use of Origins Plantidote system has helped my skin as well. It is designed to deal with inflammation from the inside out. One more thing that I hear over and over where acne is concerned – if you find something that works, stick with it.

I am going to talk a bit more in another article about the rest of Tisco’s question, in the interest again of not making this one a mile long (this template has some issues where the extended entries are concerned). Hope you will stick with me, and don’t forget to leave a comment to let us know what has worked well for your acne-prone skin!

Technorati Tags: acne, Proactiv Solution, Plantidote

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Gayla, at least you are being told your hair is beautiful! Life could be worse! Ha ha! That isn’t very helpful, I know.

Rust stains in your hair are most likely due to iron in your water, which is a common problem with well water. Boy, am I thankful that we don’t have iron in our well water. This is not an easy problem to fix-think about how hard it is to get rust stains out of fabric. Your first thoughts, and those of your hairdresser might be to bleach the stains out, but this is a bad idea for a few reasons. Bleach is incredibly hard on the hair, and bleach doesn’t really work on rust stains. What you would be doing is opening up the cuticle of the hair so much that the rust would wash out to some extent. This is a bad idea. You will end up with very fried strawberry and white blonde hair. Yuck.
There are a few things that I would try if I were you. If you see any improvement with any of them, keep repeating them daily until you are happy with the results:

1. Rinse your hair with a mixture of vinegar with some cream of tartar added to it, leaving it in for about 10 minutes before you rinse it out.

2. Try the same thing with lemon juice.

3. This is the one I know you will see some improvement with, but is a more temporary fix: Get some shampoo that is made for platinum blond and gray hair. These shampoos have a blue/purple temporary color to them which will help neutralize any red tones in your hair. Many companies make them, try Matrix’s So Silver (from salons only), or Clairol’s Shimmering Lights (you should be able to find this in the drugstore, or a Sallys Beauty Supply). To this, add a tablespoon of baking soda, mix together in your palm, and shampoo in your hair. Again, leave it in for about 10 minutes. Repeat as often as you want to.

I think your very best bet is to work towards getting that hair cut off of your head, and then prevent it from happening any further. As is almost always the case, prevention is easier than repairing damage already done. If you aren’t willing to try a shorter haircut, be sure to get your hair trimmed up regularly. On a daily basis, use shampoos that are designed to take minerals out of your hair. They will say something like “clarifying” or “removes build up.” There are a few on the market that are made for use with well water, but I have never tried any of them, so I cannot give you my real opinion on those. What I do on about a monthly basis is add a tablespoon or so of baking soda to my regular shampoos, leave in a few minutes and rinse it out. But, if I had problems like you are having I would do it at least weekly.

One more thing, rust is caused by the reaction of iron and water. Do not let your hair stay wet for long periods of time, either blow it dry, or if you must let it dry naturally, be sure and toss it around and scrunch it with your hands so it dries just as quickly as possible. If you don’t need to wash your hair daily, don’t. Be sure to use a good conditioner in your hair regularly as well, because blow drying will really make your hair dry out badly. I sure hope something in here will help you out, Gayla. Let me know if you try all of those, and nothing works, and I will dig a little deeper and try to help you out, ok? Good luck!

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