Pro-Sports

A little while back I wrote about a skin condition I had called Keratosis Pilaris and how my symptoms seem to have gotten worse again.  I had thought perhaps the worsening of my symptoms might be related to either the switch in my diet or the changes in hormones I’d recently experienced during the pregnancy and after the delivery.

Since it has been quite a while since the dermatologist made the diagnosis on my skin, I thought I’d scour the web to see if there were any new treatment developments for this skin problem.  It seems most sites still maintain that there isn’t really any treatment available to sufferers of Keratosis Pilaris, however there are recommendations on what an individual with the condition can do.

The least aggressive suggested would be to apply an emollient onto the affected areas and avoid the use of agents that could cause irritation, such as soaps.  Although the term emollient is used interchangeably with moisturisers, there is a difference.  An emollient softens the skin while a moisturiser adds moisture.

An emollient has three properties:

1. Occlusion - provides a layer of oil on the surface of the skin to reduce water loss
2. Humectant - which increases the water-holding capacity of the top layer of the skin called the stratum corneum
3. Lubrication - adds a slip or glide across the skin

Now it dawns upon me why my skin has worsened over the last few months and I don’t think it was related to the hormones or the change in diet.  Prior to the pregnancy, I used to have only one shower a day using moisturising shower gels and I would also moisturise after every shower.  As the pregnancy progressed, I got lazy and stopped moisturising after my shower.  With the pregnancy, I was also sweating all the time, so I started having two showers a day and sometimes three.  It would seem that all the washing and lack of moisturising has had rather deleterious effects on my skin. 

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