Each season has its special impact on your skin — both good and bad. Summer’s no different. While you’re outdoors and active in the heat and sun, your skin is exposed to some pretty harsh conditions. Keep it healthy and looking great with some simple changes in your skin care.

Solutions for the biggest summer skin problems that I see in my dermatology practice:

Thick, rough and cracked feet: Walking barefoot or in sandals leaves feet thick, rough and cracked. Keep them soft with exfoliation. My ’step by step’ instructions to keep your feet soft and attractive this summer: Dermatologist’s 3 Simple Steps For Sandal Ready Feet By Spring

Athlete’s foot: sweaty athletic shoes and public showers breed fungus. If your feet are scaly, itchy and cracked you may well have picked up this highly contagious problem. Get rid of the fungus before it gets worse by following my instructions: Dermatologist’s Tips For Athlete’s Foot Fungus Treatment.

Chapped and sunburned lips: Sun and wind chap and burn lips fast. You need good sun protection when you’re outdoors, and mineral sunscreen products designed specifically for the lips, such as Lip Cotz, are the best. Some colored lipsticks can also give your lips good sun protection.

For moist, healthy lips you also need constant applications of a really good lip balm like Ceralip or pure shea butter. I recommend avoiding lip balms with a lot of medicated or herbal ingredients because I see so many people whose severely chapped lips are actually due to allergic reactions to these ingredients. I recommend using just the hydrating ointment base in lip balms and skipping all the dicey ‘extras.’

Gardener’s Hands: chapped, rough and cracked hands are a part of summer for you if you’re a gardener (like me). Good hand care is essential to keeping your hands looking even remotely presentable outside of the garden. The same hand care that I outlined in the winter for all the folks with chapped hands from hand sanitizers will fix your gardener-worn hands too.

“Embarrassing” arms and legs!: I can’t tell you how many people are embarrassed to show off their arms and legs; like it or not, summer fashions show more skin. After about our mid-twenties, just about everybody has to put a little work into keeping their arm and leg skin looking good. My recommendations:

At a minimum, moisturizing will help control the dry, flaky scale and give your skin an attractive, dewy look.

Adding sun protection plus alpha hydroxy acid hydration combined with physical exfoliation keeps the age spots from darkening. I give you instructions in my post: Stop The Summer Darkening of Your Age Spots.

On top of that, if you add a sunless tanner, you’ll have evenly bronzed, dewy hydrated skin with a buffed and polished glow! I tell you how in: Use Self Tanners Like A Pro.

Stressed facial skin: In the summer, facial skin care is all about survival; summer sun and environmental exposure will cause permanent damage to your facial skin unless you protect it every day. Sunscreen and antioxidant skin care products are essential for anyone seriously concerned about facial wrinkles and age spots (not to mention skin cancer). The best sunscreens are the mineral-based products. The best antioxidant protection comes from products with high concentrations of vitamin C and products that combine green tea and caffeine. Every day there are new ‘miracle’ antioxidants and sunscreens hitting the skin care market, but in my opinion, the mineral sunscreens and vitamin C and green tea/caffeine antioxidant products have the best scientific evidence proving their benefits; they’re what I personally use and recommend for my patients.

With good skin care you can have soft, healthy and fabulous-looking skin all summer long.

If you found this information helpful, you may also want to read:

How To Get The Most Out Of Your Anti Aging Skin Care

5 Steps For Smart Sun Protection

Photo: Thanks and gratitude to Dystopian

I’m off for a much needed vacation.

For the next 3 weeks my ‘to do’ list is filled with staring at beautiful vistas and practicing my sun protection advice.  My husband and I are taking a very long plane ride to celebrate our 27th anniversary and over 3 decades of life together.  I’ve decided not to auto publish blog posts in my absence since I won’t be here to respond to your comments and questions.  Have a lovely 3 weeks and I’ll ’see’ you when I return!

Photo Attribution: Diluvi

I’m ecstatic and filled with gratitude to be making friends on the web who are helping me get my message out about healthy skin care.

Using the web to get high quality and scientifically sound skin care information out to the world as a lone physician takes help from a lot of friends and colleagues — with the web it’s a virtual village. The web is filled with mountains of misinformation in the beauty and skin care ‘niche’. Good information won’t make it to you, the reader, unless the search engines bring your attention to it. Getting any notice from the search engines is a big job on the topic of skin care because of all the noise made by the zillions of advertisers and spam makers. It takes the help of the virtual village to rise above the commotion, and I’m thrilled to have it. Every time one of my new virtual friends helps me spread the word about my skin health blog posts and twitter tweets the search engines hear me just a little bit better. The more that happens, the more likely you are to find me on one of the first search pages when you’re looking on the web for skin care and skin health information.

Putting high quality health information on the web where people with skin problems can find it is my goal. I’m grateful for all my web friends in this virtual village and would like to say ‘thank you’. Some of the recent help I’ve received from my web friends includes:

• Organizedwisdom.com who selected me as one of the top sources on the web for skin health information in May. Organizedwisdom.com is a new search service that brings quality health care information from both the web and social media to people searching for specific health advice. Experts are listed on profile pages and the quality of their online activity and information is ranked. I’m pleased to have been nominated for and included in this new search technology.
• Dr. Jeffrey Benabio (aka thedermblog.com) has added my blog to his blog roll! Dr. Benabio is the pioneer dermatology blogger and we owe him a huge debt of gratitude for blazing the trail. His quality health information has helped millions of readers take good care of their skin and I’m thrilled to be included on his blog roll.

I look forward to working with the members of our virtual village as we build credible and scientifically sound health care information resources that are accessible to you, the reader, as you search the web for health information.

Photo Attribution:

Glorious blue sky and the sound of sprinklers-summer is here! If you asked the golden grasses in Sonoma County they would tell you that spring is over.  The corn and tomato plants in my vegetable garden agree, as do the birds that just finished off the cherries on my tree.

Here in Sonoma County we get our entire year’s rainfall between October and June.  Normally gray rain clouds are punctuated by bright blue skies, but this year it was one long gray march to summer.   The up side to months of Scotland-like weather: happy water tables, full reservoirs and spring plant colors that dazzled.   I was particularly taken in by the pinks.  Pink flowers were everywhere-soft pinks, brilliant pinks, double pinks-I’ll remember spring 2010 in Sonoma County as PRETTY IN PINK and I snapped lots of photos when the sky did give us a sunny break.  They’re my tribute to spring and my welcome to summer.  Happy summer solstice!

Wishing you  lots of BBQ’s, tomatoes and languid days this summer.

And have fresh, clean looking skin!

Do you know that not every clogged pore is a black head?

Sometimes you can see ‘dark stuff’ in your pores just because they’re full of what pores naturally secrete-oil and dead skin cells- mixed with a lot of normal skin germs.

Other times, that black stuff in your pore is really a true blackhead, meaning it’s a hard plug of dead skin cells that gotten stuck in the pore, just like a cork stuck in a bottle.  Most of the time this is due to acne.  Sometimes, however the hardened ‘blackhead’ material is due to little milia cysts that opened up and look like blackheads.

If you have clogged pores then just washing your skin won’t get the pores cleaned.  Whether you have blackheads or not, you’ll need special products and some simple treatments to get that stuff out of your pores so that your skin looks clean, healthy and beautiful.  The good news is that you can do a lot of effective skin treatments yourself, without seeing a doctor. But warning, this topic is a little gross.

Steps to clean and unclogged your pores to get your skin looking it’s best!

1.  Cleaning Out Your Clogged Pores That Don’t Have Blackheads

This involves giving your skin a regular good cleaning and occasional gentle massage to express the pore contents (yes this sounds gross).

The first step is cleansing in a way that gets down into your pores a little bit.  The best, and simplest way is with regular use of the Clarisonic brush and a gentle cleanser. The sonic waves get the cleanser into your pores and gently massage your skin.  You may want to use a slightly gentler cleanser with the Clarisonic because cleansers can be irritating and they penetrate more deeply into your skin when you use them with the Clarisonic. My cleanser choices:

• For normal to sensitive skin does best with a cleanser like Noble Zinc Soap or Toleriane Cleanser or a simple glycerin bar soap (my favorite is Whole Foods 365 brand).
• For tolerant to oily skin that needs help with exfoliation does well with a glycolic cleanser like Glytone Mild Gel Wash.
• For acne prone skin benefits from both glycolic and salicylic acids like OTB Oil Off Cleansers, or benzoyl peroxide as in OTB Medicated Cleanser #1.

You can buy a Clarisonic brush online or in stores.  We sell the more powerful professional version, the Clarisonic Pro, in the office.  If you don’t have a Clarisonic brush, you could instead use an exfoliating facial sponge like the Buf Puf Facial Sponge. Use one of the cleansers I mentioned and cleanse your skin with a very gentle massaging motion.

If your pores still don’t look empty and clean after several weeks with the Clarisonic or Buf Puf sponge, then the process can be helped along with a little gentle manual massage to get the stuff out (yes this part sounds even grosser). Think of your pores like little tubes of tooth paste, filled with the stuff they secrete (oil and cells that look dark and dirty inside your pores) instead of toothpaste.  Normally, this stuff comes out nicely on its own, but it can be hurried along with a little gentle squeeze.  This is what a professional skin care specialist does during a facial.  They VERY GENTLY compress small areas of skin together to get the pore contents out, like squeezing toothpaste out of the tube!  For example, on the nose, gently pinching about 1/2 inch of skin together will cause the material in the pores to come out if it’s soft and ready.  It’s important that the skin never be pinched so hard that it’s injured or bruised.  Of course, the best way to do this is to have a regular facial by a good aesthetician, and let them take care of the pore cleaning and extractions.  They even have a little instrument that does a really good job.  Getting a facial every 6 to 8 weeks is ideal to keeping pores really clean.

2.  Cleaning Out Your Clogged Pores That Have Blackheads

Whether the stuff in the pores are truly black heads or just normal secretions that have hardened up over time and are acting like blackheads, it’s important to use products called ‘keratolytics’ to soften them up.  Keratolytics loosen the material that holds the dead cells into a firm plug inside your pores. The ingredients in skin care products that act as keratolytics include glycolic acid, benzoyl peroxide, salicylic acid and retinoids like tretinoin in Retin A. The simplest treatment is to use them in a cleanser form to wash your skin.  If your pores are badly clogged then the ‘leave-on’ products work best.  These include gels, lotions and creams.  I recommend picking products with one or more of these keratolytic ingredients and using them according to the instructions for a month or so.  By softening the material in the pores your body may be able to gradually dissolve the plug.  You may also be able to then get it to come out with the gentle massage technique I mentioned above. My favorite keratolytic options include OTB SKIN Acne Kits and Glytone Mild Gel Wash and Exfoliating Lotion.

If keratolytics don’t unclog your pores, then you’re going to need professional help to get the pores cleaned up.  A series of facials that include extractions, done every 6 weeks is good for most people.  For really tough clogged pores, it may be necessary to have medical extractions done in a dermatology office by the doctor or the nurse.

If you’re prone to blackheads, you’re going to need to continue using keratolytics to keep new blackheads from forming once you’ve unclogged your pores. My product choices to keep pores clean and healthy for people prone to clogged pores:

• For acne prone or tough oily skin I like my OTB SKIN Acne Kits which contain the entire 3 non-prescription pore cleaning keratolytic ingredients.
• For skin that needs exfoliation, but is not prone to pimples (pustules), I like glycolic acid alone, like in my Glycolic Acid Facial Kits.
• For acne prone skin in people who are allergic to salicylic acid or have skin that is too sensitive for glycolic acid I have them try benzoyl peroxide alone as in OTB SKIN Medicated Cleanser #1 used with a Facial Buf Puf, and then the OTB SKIN Bacteria Removing Lotion.
• For clogged pores on the back and chest I recommend my OTB SKIN Back Acne Kit.
• For people who also require prescriptions keratolytics I prescribe tretinoin/Retin A.

Lastly, professional procedures like mild chemical peels will help to control clogged pores.  Talk to your skin care professional to see if you are a good candidate for these procedures.

Clogged pores are frustrating and common.  No one likes them, and with the right products and techniques it’s possible to have clean, healthy unclogged pores…..

and  fresh, clean looking skin!

If You Found This Information Helpful, You May Want To Also Read:

Facial Skin Care For Problem Skin With Rosacea, Seborrhea And Clogged Pores

Common Reasons Why Your Acne Treatment Might Not Be Working

Back Acne & Chest Acne: Will They Ruin Your Summer?

Photo Attributions: