Your skin is always in conversation with your whole body and hormonal shifts can shape how your skin feels and behaves.
We asked Everyday Oil friend Morgan Miller, a certified professional midwife and co-author of The Cycle Book: An Interactive Step-by-Step Guide to Tracking Hormones and Knowing Your Body, to share her insight. She reminds us that hormones aren’t something to fix or fear and with some curiosity (instead of control), we can learn to listen.
**********
Maybe the idea of hormonal skin brings flashbacks to those dreaded teenage years combating acne, but if you’ve graduated that era of your life, don’t forget how powerful hormones can be in refining your skincare routine. By understanding your individual unique-to-only-you hormones, you may be able to unlock that dream skincare routine you’ve been striving for.
We have hormone receptors throughout our bodies, which means changing hormones can affect all of our systems, including that oh-so gorgeous outer organ of yours–your skin.
This means, if you’ve noticed skin changes throughout your life, your hormones may be involved. And we’re not pointing fingers of blame here, but understanding your hormones can really help guide how you take care of yourself.
Hormones do get a real bad rap these days. Being hormonal still gets slung around as an insult. If you engage in social media, then you’re probably familiar with an onslaught of tweaking, hacking, balancing, and fixing of hormones. But what actually are hormones and are they all actually broken?
When it comes down to it, hormones are simply tiny little chemical messengers floating around in the body. These messengers travel around all of your body systems and update your cells on what your body needs. And these clever little hormones are meant to change, so we can in turn adapt our changing bodies and the everchanging world we live in.
KNOWING YOUR HORMONES
Options for testing hormones with a provider exist, but there are ways your skin can communicate about your hormones too. Whether you're fine tuning your skincare routine or trying to understand breakouts or eczema flare ups, tracking skin changes over time, can give you amazing insight into what your hormones are up to.
Paying attention to how frequently your skin changes (sudden dryness, oiliness, acne, tightness, itching, flaking…), might offer up a pattern that you can apply to your skincare routine to prevent those less than comfortable skin days and set you up to feel good in skin all of the time. Hormones after all follow many different patterns of fluctuations, so why shouldn’t our skincare routine? The menstrual cycle, hormonal therapies, birth control, and even illness or medications can offer up their own new and particular hormonal patterns and in turn shifts in how our skin feels.
KEY HORMONE PLAYERS AND SKIN
꩜ Estrogen stimulates collagen production and can also suppress sebum (a natural oil barrier and moisturizer) production.
꩜ Progesterone can increase inflammation around pores, which can trap sebum, sometimes leading to breakouts and can also help out with collagen turnover.
꩜ Testosterone can increase sebum production.
SUPPORTING YOUR SKIN
Once you start to identify how hormones are showing up in your body, you can start to set up a routine that holistically supports your skin.
꩜ Do you break out before you get your period? That might be the decrease in estrogen and the rise in progesterone. Increasing gentle exfoliation and using a dry brush for the weeks leading up to your bleeding phase could be a perfect addition.
꩜ Do you get eczema flare-ups cyclically? If these flare ups happen in the middle of your menstrual cycle, it could be a drop in estrogen. Focusing on anti-inflammatory foods and nourishment in the weeks before ovulation could help mellow things out.
꩜ Do you feel like your skin is so much dryer than it used to be? Maybe there are big hormone shifts like perimenopause taking place, where estrogen and progesterone start to dip a little lower. Your body may love a few extra pumps of Everyday Oil.
꩜ Does your skin get extra flushed with your testosterone therapy? Integrating deep oil cleanses and using a gua sha a few days before testosterone administration and a few days after could start to help take the edge off as your body regulates.
Understanding how your very individual hormones communicate in your body can be a game-changer. And when it comes to your skincare, we don’t necessarily need to blame the messengers. Learning to understand how your hormones show up in your body just might be the missing piece to unlocking your perfect skincare routine!