How To Hydrate Dry Skin Around the Eyes
By Camille Poggi
Hydration is the holy nectar for the skin. If your skin is hydrated, it can function on all cylinders far better than when it’s parched. Hydrated skin has a higher level of water in its cells, which enriches them and makes the skin appear plump, as opposed to dehydrated skin, which can appear dull and rough. Hydration is important for skin all over, but the skin around the eyes is particularly sensitive and can show signs of dehydration quickly.
Hydrated skin is different than moisturized skin—moisturizer, or in this case, a moisturizing eye cream, is a step towards hydrating your skin but you can moisturize your skin and it can still be dehydrated. We know, it’s confusing. Don’t worry, we’ll show you how to tell if the dry skin around your eyes is dehydrated and how to fix it, a process that involves both hydrating and moisturizing the skin around and under your eyes. When you do this, your skin will appear smoother, brighter, fuller, and all around more youthful-looking.
Why It’s Important to Hydrate Around the Eyes
The delicate skin around the eyes is thinner than the rest of your skin, which is why it’s important to treat it with care. It also doesn’t have as many oil glands as the rest of your skin, which means it is more prone to dehydration and flaky skin. For these reasons, this delicate skin is one of the first areas to show signs of aging. Unfortunately, these signs of aging are only amplified when the skin is dry.
You’ve probably heard it said a hundred times—be gentle with the skin around your eyes, resist harsh rubbing, and avoid certain skincare products you may use on your face. These tips can help the skin around your eyes stay healthy-looking, but they’re just the beginning of proper eye skin care. Hydrating the skin around the eyes is critical for its overall wellbeing.
From a visual standpoint, hydrated skin appears plumper, smoother, and more vibrant—qualities that work wonders for reducing the appearance of fine lines and dark circles under the eyes. With simple hydration, you can prevent bags, wrinkles, and dark circles from forming under the eyes. If you are wondering how eye cream works and why you should be using it on a daily basis, our experts are here to help. Keep reading to find out how to hydrate dry eye skin and achieve a more youthful-looking complexion.
Signs of Dry Skin Around Eyes
Many people deal with dry skin around the eyes or dry skin under the eyes. The signs are pretty easy to spot. If you have fine lines and wrinkles that are more noticeable or pronounced, or if your skin is rough or dull, it’s likely dehydrated. Other obvious signs include dry, flaky patches and redness. Even if you don’t experience dry skin around the eyes all of the time, it can benefit you to take steps to hydrate your skin to prevent it from becoming dry.
When to See a Doctor
There are other instances where you may think you have dry or dehydrated skin, but the issue is actually more serious. If you have itchy, inflamed, or scaly skin around the eyes or on the eyelids, you may be experiencing a skin condition such as eczema, contact dermatitis, or blepharitis. In these cases, contact your dermatologist to diagnose the issue before you try solving it on your own.
How to Hydrate Dry Skin Around Eyes
Hydration around the eye area is important for everyone. Take these steps to hydrate the skin around the eyes for visibly healthier skin.
Get More Water
Beauty starts from within… and so does hydration. To properly hydrate dry skin around the eyes, it’s important to properly hydrate the body. This means drinking plenty of water and eating healthy foods with high water content such as fruits and veggies. Upping your water intake is step number one because, without water, your skin cells have nowhere to look for hydration.
Use Hydrating Products
Skincare products that contain hydrating ingredients can encourage your skin to absorb moisture. Some of the most hydrating ingredients, called humectants, include hyaluronic acid, alpha-hydroxy acids, glycerin, glycogen, propylene, butylene glycol, aloe vera, and even honey. Each of these ingredients has its own unique benefits but all of them attract water from the air or deeper within the skin to hydrate skin cells on the surface.
To reap the hydrating benefits of these ingredients, try our Keep Young & Beautiful Instant Brightening Beauty Shot, which contains hyaluronic acid and glycerin to hydrate the skin and smooth the appearance of wrinkles and fine lines.
Moisturize
As we mentioned at the start, hydration and moisture are different, but you need both to battle dry skin.
Moisturizer helps lock in water and keeps it from escaping. While your skin’s natural barrier is usually pretty good at this task, when your skin is dehydrated, it lacks the strength it needs to prevent water loss. So while you can make every effort to hydrate your skin, you need a clean moisturizer to ensure it retains that hydration. For the skin under your eyes, this comes in the form of eye cream. A moisturizing eye cream will not only lock in moisture but will also contain lipids that help strengthen the skin’s natural barrier so it can become more effective at doing this on its own. The result? A tag-team effect that fights dehydration and, with continued use, helps keep your skin from becoming dehydrated again.
Try our Keep Young & Beautiful Firm & Lift Eye Cream, a deeply nourishing eye cream that contains ceramide-like, carthame, and other lipids that help strengthen the skin barrier and prevent moisture loss.
Be Gentle
Dry skin around the eyes is particularly sensitive, so it’s important to treat it gently. While you may be worried about signs of aging and tempted to reach for intense ingredients, they can easily aggravate your sensitized dry skin. Instead, opt for a formula that will address dryness and other concerns.
Radiance Brightening Dark Circle Eye Cream features bioactives that work to brighten, hydrate and plump the look of the entire eye area, and is especially designed to limit irritation, proven in a consumer study. To combat dryness, it also contains glycogen, which helps the skin retain moisture, resulting in more hydrated, smoother, firmer, and plumper-looking skin.
Pay Attention to your Environment
There are plenty of factors that can cause dry skin around eyes, but one of the biggest culprits is your environment. Changing weather, cold winters, dry climates, and places with limited natural airflow such as airplanes or offices with cranked-up thermostats, can all contribute to dry skin.
The best thing you can do to hydrate dry skin is to tend to the skin under and around your eyes continuously when in any of these environments. This means applying eye cream, or a mask, before you get on the airplane or during the cold weather months, not just before you go to bed at night. In dry environments, the lack of moisture in the air means you’re more likely to develop dry, flaky skin. But an eye cream can serve as a protective layer between the environment and your delicate eye area and keep moisture from escaping. In addition to using an eye cream, consider investing in a humidifier, especially for your bedroom, where it can pump moisture back into the air during dry seasons, which can drastically assist your hydration efforts.
We recommend keeping a lightweight product, such as Vita Mineral Active 7 Eye Gel, with you so you can easily reapply at any time of the day. Over or under makeup, this gel will provide a much-needed boost of hydration and leave the skin around and under your eyes brighter and less puffy.
Be Consistent
Eye cream is an easy product to forget, but the trick to hydrating dry skin around the eyes is to be consistent. When your skin is dehydrated, it needs constant hydration and protection from further moisture loss, so develop the habit. Drink plenty of water, and use an eye cream morning and night, and in any environment that threatens to steal what hydration you have. Once you find the right skin care product, you'll be able to support your skin barrier around your eyes and keep your complexion youthful-looking and radiant. If you follow these simple tips, you’ll be able to experience the benefits of hydrated skin (plump, bright, bouncy, more youthful-looking) more often.
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About the Author
Camille Poggi is a doctor in Pharmacy (PharmD.) and is passionate about skincare and how the skin works in general. She specializes in the cosmetic industry and worked for renowned companies in France like L’Oréal and Chanel before moving to London. After being a training manager for 4 years, Camille is at ease with explaining how products work in the skin and how to adapt her speech according to the audience.
She joined REN in January 2020 as International Training Manager and moved to the Research & Development team earlier this year to be the new Scientific Education Manager. A tailored-made role where she assesses and leads all technical communication and ensures scientific compliance is always met. She’s also involved in new product development from the earliest stages. Finding a way to create sustainable skincare products and making sure the message is properly delivered and understood is definitely a big challenge but also her favorite part working for REN.
