During the winter, your skin care regimen is always top of mind, washing your hands religiously and an acute awareness of the dryness in the air through itchy skin and constant shocks. During the summer, however, you can practically swim through the humid Midwest air and you sweat as though you were made of water. Your skin should be perfectly healthy and should look great, right?

It’s a little more complicated…

Summer raises a whole new batch of concerns when it comes to skin care, and Signature Male offers a different approach to taking care of your face in the heat and humidity of Iowa summers:

• Employ a daily face wash. You’re sweating more – well, constantly – which attracts more pollutants and lets them stick to your skin and clog your pores. Find a face wash that isn’t too harsh and is recommended for daily use.
• Hydrate. We all know we’re supposed to consume 8 glasses of water each day, and it’s even more important to follow that rule of thumb during the sweltering summer months when you sweat out half your body weight daily. But hydration doesn’t only apply to drinking water. If you use a light daily moisturizer on your face, you can stop your facial skin overproducing oils to replenish everything you’ve sweated out.
• Sunscreen reigns supreme. Sure, we all want a little color on our faces after a long winter of being indoors and seeing a strong resemblance to Gollum. But it’s far too easy to burn your skin, which sucks all the fluids and moisture out of your skin. Not to mention that repeated sunburns can cause cancer and can age you prematurely. You can find a light suncreen that blocks both UVA (causes aging) and UVB (causes burns) rays with differing levels of sun-blocking.
• Exfoliate. Your face sloughs off dead skin All. Day. Long. You would be thoroughly disgusted if you really knew how much. This dead skin stays just on the surface and mixes with sweat and oil and burrows down in your pores causing blemishes and just generally dulling your skin. An exfoliating scrub will remove all that dead matter and will make your skin look and feel brand-new.
• Don’t over-shave. Shaving is pretty hard on your skin. Shaving creams are generally pretty drying on their own, and scraping a razor over your face every day can cause more irritation and even more drying. Try to shave every other day at the most, and be sure to use a good after-shave. Originally employed to fight off infections caused by minor scrapes and cuts perpetrated during shaving, after-shaves in today’s age soothe and repair skin that you just wiped a blade all over.

–Signature Male