After about a decade of living in Beijing I still need reminders that Beijing winters are extremely dry. There’s nothing wrong with my skin, it’s the weather.

This time of the year, your summertime skincare products need to be changed to something that’s thicker and possibly oil-based to prevent you from having dry itchy skin. And the same goes for your kid.

This winter, I thought my daughter had suddenly developed some kind of skin disease when she suddenly wouldn’t stop scratching her arms, legs, and tiny little butt cheeks and had little red marks all over. Then a friend reminded me about just how dry this weather is. A quick change to her skincare products, and all the itchiness was gone within days.

Here are the toddler-friendly products that may help your kids this winter:

Bodorme Baby Milk Bath Oil

Beijing’s water is harsh and hopefully you’ve installed your water filters all over the house. If not, contact Greenwave for the right type of filter for any type of faucet you have. The Bodorme Baby Mild Bath Oil helps soothe their skin while your child bathes. It’s a good one to ensure that they’ve got a nice layer of protection all over their body.

Aveno Baby Moisturing Massage Oil

I started using this for my toddler immediately following her bath while her skin is still damp. During the really dry winter months, oils work better than regular lotions at locking in moisture.

Sudocrem

This is a must-have for parents. It’s an antiseptic healing cream that can be used for diaper rash, eczema, sunburn, and small wounds. I started applying this to the scratches my daughter’s left on her arms, legs, and butt cheeks, and within days they were all gone.

Dermoplast

This is my go-to when it comes to heavy duty first aid. It’s not recommended for daily use, but when you need to keep your small child from scratching a wound, one spray and it’ll numb the entire surface. Be careful not to get any into your mouth and eyes!

Then, in general, add a humidifier to your home. They help alleviate the dryness in the air and keep nasal passages moist, reducing congestion. They also help in preventing dry skin and, as an added bonus (for some), they have a soothing white noise that helps kids sleep.

If you do have a humidifier at home, be sure to clean it often and thoroughly. Mold and residue in build up pretty quickly in humidifiers and can lead to health risks. The best way to clean is to use baking soda and vinegar to ensure that you’re not introducing any toxins into the machine. If you are using a ready-mixed cleaning solution, be sure it’s nontoxic.

Images: Taobao, Pexels

Plastic surgery has been making local headlines again recently, namely plastic surgeries gone wrong. Some of the worst highlights included terrible infections that led to chronic pain and disfigurement, and even a celebrity dying after a five-hour surgery went awry. Far be it from me to knock anyone’s personal choices, though I will say that if you’re going to get something done, get it done right. Any time surgery is involved, it’s definitely not the time to pinch pennies or compromise on safety standards.

Having said that, I must declare that I am far too much of a coward to go under the knife, no matter how much my asymmetrical single/double eyelids bother me, or how much I covertly wince when my husband playfully teases me about my beginnings of a double chin. In lieu of any injections or nip/tucks, I have opted for a (more) balanced, nutritious diet, and a consistent beauty regimen involving natural skincare and traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) habits such as the increasingly popular 刮痧 guasha, a small massage tool that promotes healthy circulation.

Don’t get scared off yet! Just imagine the coveted v-shaped jawline and high cheekbones of your favorite model, or the dewy, plump skin of every K-pop star, and bear with me here. Guasha is a perfectly natural method of increasing blood flow to stimulate your body’s innate lymphatic drainage system responsible for getting rid of toxins. In laymen’s terms: It helps your body do what it already does, but better and more frequently, which is important as we get older, not to mention in keeping up with modern lifestyle habits (i.e we are sedentary and eat way more refined carbohydrates than we should). The benefits of gua sha are multitudinous, ranging from easing chronic body pains to migraine relief and even lowering liver inflammation to stave off Hepatitis B!

For now, let’s just focus on our face and how incorporating guasha into your daily beauty regimen could be a knife-saver, in that it may reduce the need or desire for a quick plastic surgery fix later on. Start gently with broad, slow strokes from the bottom of your chin towards your ears, and move inwards. To target frown lines: Use the more pointy edge of your gua sha tool to apply a little pressure on the space between your brows, and move in small upward strokes.

Pro tip: Do this right after you apply serum/cream to increase its absorption into your skin. Check out this article on exactly how to use your guasha tool. 

Don’t have a gua sha tool yet? You’re in luck! We teamed up with local eco-friendly store The Bulk House to give one lucky reader a jade guasha worth RMB 108 this weekend!

Simply scan the QR code below or search The Bulk House in WeChat to follow their official account, and send them a message saying “Zero Waste Beauty” along with your WeChat ID by Sunday (Aug 8) at 8pm.

KEEP READING: How A 3,000-Year-Old Game Changed My China Experience

Images: Unsplash, The Bulk House

“What happened to his hand?” My husband asks as he turns over our four-year-old’s little wrist. There we see what looks like a really bad scrape across his knuckles. I review our playground time, I check his school communications, I think back to that morning. Did he fall anywhere? No, nothing had happened.

“Honey, did you fall?” He seems confused and says no. But something must have happened. I take his hand to inspect the scrape again, and that’s when I feel it. His skin is all dry and scaley like it’s about to flake off.

He has eczema. I know it well. I understood when we moved from milder climates to Beijing winters that it would rear its ugly head in full force. I remember my younger years when my mouth was so cracked that it looked like someone had spread lipstick around it, my young adult life when the bitter cold air would invade my skin so that I walked around town as a gaping open wound. Out of everything my poor youngest kid inherits from me — his sparkling eyes, his huge smile, his monstrous hugs — he also had to get this ailment.

Educator Kim Clifford recalls how she found a way to help her son Lachlan, five. “We fought dry skin for my son since his birth. During COVID, we discovered most of the cause was a wheat allergy. We cut it out and it did wonders for his skin. He would scratch until he bled before. Now we just have to lotion his hands due to the cold weather and the harsh soap used at school. We previously used Cetaphil as it was the only one that would work. Now we use Aveeno for his hands.”

I know that rhythm very well. You find one way to keep it at bay, then your skin gets too used to it and you need another gel, another lotion, another thing to squeeze out of a tube that might possibly bring you relief. Then, that remedy stops being effective, and the cycle begins anew.

Nikki Malek, who is known in Shanghai for organizing adventures for families, says that as soon as the weather turns colder, her skin starts peeling. Even something as simple as soap in a public bathroom will cause the tops of her hands to shred and get incredibly red and raw. She found relief in Bebebalm, a product created by Shanghai Mom Carol Ong and her doctor husband to help their baby with his horribly dry skin. The balm comes in jars or portable sticks and can also be used as chapstick. Malek admits she will take the chapstick with her and slather it on any part of her skin that feels dry.

The cycle of lotions never ends

I personally go through at least one tube of chapstick a month. If I forget a tube, I must buy a new one, or by the end of even a mild winter day, my lips will bleed from cracking. A change of climate is especially harsh on eczema and affects which products will work. After my second child was born and we were potty training my first, I washed my hands so often every day that the only ointment that worked was Burts’ Bees Fishermen’s Hand Salve. It took a product specifically created for fishermen’s cracking dry skin to give me any relief.

Even after finding her miracle product, Malek knows that she can’t overuse it and so finds ways to maintain a little skin moisture equilibrium. “This past year, the skin started shredding on the tops of my legs and arms. I had to apply an oil made of raw wild garlic oil. It smells awful, and I love the smell of garlic, but this smells just awful. After a shower, I will pour oil over my own body. I use an affordable brand from Germany, then I put lotion on in the mornings, not every morning, but around two to three times a week.” She even carries her own soap supplies and wears gloves and legwarmers to keep moisture inside of her skin.

I think of all these methods as I look back down at my son’s hands. I can see on his face that he is also confused because eczema has this weird side effect: if you give in to the itch and scratch your skin, it feels good in a really weird kind of way. You are tearing your skin open each time you drag your fingernails across the skin that aches for it, and it feels satisfying. That must be so confusing to a young kid. He’d grown out of biting his nails and picking his nose (mostly), but this is an entirely different beast. This sticks with you.

I know what he’s going to have to endure because I did it and still go through it. Years of moisturizing, of keeping tabs on my stress levels and the dry wintertime air, and even that one summer when it got so unbearable that I walked into work crying. My skin was affecting my health, my mental state, my self-worth. Luckily, my co-worker knew what was happening. She’d been through it, and continued to fight it every day.

“You need the three Cs,” she told me. “Cotton, cortizone, and chamomile. Only wear cotton against your skin, use Coritzone — gel, not cream — for the really bad spots, and drink chamomile tea, then refrigerate the tea bags for a natural itch suppressant.”

I followed her advice and also changed the soap I used for washing any part of my body. I returned to the Aveeno of my youth, to the oatmeal baths as prescribed in last week’s article, and more. And my skin did clear up. But that took 19 years to figure out. It’s time to start my little guy on his path to self skincare early.

KEEP READING: Preventing and Caring for Dry Skin in Beijing’s Long, Cold Winters

Photos: Carol Ong, Pexels

The Beijing cold is creeping in, and that can mean dry skin for the whole family. In between the biting wind, the low humidity, the constant central heating, and the less-than-stellar water quality, it can start to feel like there is no way to stop yourself from turning into a scaly reptile by the time Christmas rolls around. However, a judicious selection of skincare products and home remedies can go a long way to preventing and caring for dry skin (and it doesn’t have to cost you a fortune, either). Last year, our former editor Pauline van Hasselt tried a number of home remedies to keep skin moist and supple.

Just when you thought it was safe to go in the water…

Don’t shower every day

This tip can be difficult to adhere to if you love to luxuriate in the bath or shower, but trust us that it will make a difference in the long term. Long, hot showers can disrupt the skin’s natural barrier and strip away natural oils, leaving skin more susceptible to the elements. As dermatologist Dr. Lotus Lv noted in an interview with the Beijinger, this is especially true in cities with hard water like Beijing, as the minerals in the water mean that soaps and body washes don’t foam up as much, meaning you may be tempted to use more to get that squeaky clean feeling.

Oats are a hero ingredient when it comes to homemade skincare

Try an oatmeal bath

This one sounds like an old wive’s tale but it does work. Colloidal oatmeal (oatmeal that has been finely ground and suspended in a liquid) is a popular ingredient in many skincare products, such as those made by popular brand Aveeno. Make your own moisturizing bath without running out and buying any expensive creams by grinding a cup or so of oats to a fine powder in a food processor or coffee grinder — you’ll know it’s fine enough when it dissolves in water. Then, simply dump these in the bath or, for easier cleanup, put them in a sock or old pantyhose tied at the top (bonus: kids also love to play with the slimy sock in the bath). Just remember the tip above — oats may be moisturizing but you should still avoid staying in the water for more than about 10-15 minutes.

Oils really are essential

Pauline suggested lacing your bath with coconut oil and a few drops of essential oil. It might not be great for the bathroom plumbing if you do it all the time, but it should help to keep your skin glowing and smelling like a tropical drink. You can also try rubbing some coconut oil, jojoba oil, sweet almond oil, or another skin-safe carrier oil into dry patches of skin before you bathe to create a barrier between your skin and the Beijing water. Top any post-bath moisturizers with a light coating of oil to lock in the benefits of the cream.

Mix up a homemade body scrub

Scrub up

In order to allow your skincare products — home remedies or otherwise — to penetrate into the skin, it helps to first remove any pesky dry or dead skin by exfoliating. Look for gentle exfoliators that scrub rather than scratch and damage the skin. Our old friend oatmeal can lend a hand here again. For a simple homemade body scrub, grind around half a cup of oats to a fine-ish powder, then mix with 2-3 tbsp each of almond meal/ground almonds and light brown sugar, 1 tbsp honey, and enough milk (preferably fresh, no UHT) to form a paste. Massage onto the body and then rinse off.

*It goes without saying that you should only try any of these remedies if you know you aren’t allergic to any of the ingredients, or that you should do a patch test before you start

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Images: Unsplash (Christin Hume, Keven Baquerizo, Melissa di Rocco), Pxhuel