Your skin feels tight, hot, itchy, prickly, inflamed. It looks red or blotchy and reacts with painful inflammation to your favorite products. Even a splash of water may set it off! You call it “sensitive”. It’s probably actually what skin care professionals like myself call “sensitized”. What does this mean for you? Call it what you like, you need Dermalogica UltraCalming™ for serious relief.

Truly sensitive skin is technically a genetic condition which is inherited. It may be related to asthma, certain allergies, and other inflammatory responses. Dermatologists state that 50% of their patients experience inflammatory skin conditions which patients describe as “sensitive skin”.

More likely, this condition is sensitization, which is a response to external factors applied to the skin, and conditions in the environment. The most common of these, causing violent inflammatory reactions, are aggressive medi-spa procedures and exfoliation ingredients. You know, a microdermabrasion / laser lunchtime combo with a glycolic acid chaser.

And, free radicals, sun damage, toxins in the air, including micropollutants in your indoor environment, like fumes from a new carpet, etc., all can antagonize your skin’s immune response, nervous system and other defensive processes to produce the blushing, flushing, stinging and other symptoms. Add stress to the mix and you’ve got a five-alarm face.

The bad news – the skin’s inflammatory reaction, and aggressive procedures which may trigger these reactions, make the skin thinner, more fragile, less elastic, and thus actually may make the skin seem to age faster because it is less resilient.

The good news: the new UltraCalming™ system helps skin chill out, banish irritation, quiet down any flare-ups, shield against stress, become more tolerant—good for your skin, and for the rest of you, too.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 7th, 2010 at 3:07 pm and is filed under under my skin with jane wurwand, founder of dermalogica.