summer skin is a different beast honestly

Everyone talks about winter skin being dry and miserable, and yeah, that's real. But I find the summer switch genuinely harder to navigate? Like my skin goes from needing all the moisture in the world to suddenly being oily by 11am and I'm stood there in the pharmacy thinking what is happening. The main thing I've noticed — and this took me embarrassingly long to clock — is that humidity changes how your skin loses water. Not just surface oiliness, actual barrier function stuff. When the air is heavy and warm, your skin doesn't have to work as hard to retain moisture, but if you're still loading it with the same thick creams you used in February, you're basically suffocating it. I switched to a lighter gel moisturiser in June last year and honestly it made such a difference. Less congestion, fewer random spots around my chin. Sunscreen is obviously the big one and I'm not going to lecture because you've heard it. But what I will say is I basically stopped wearing it properly in my twenties because every formula felt awful under makeup, and I only found ones I actually liked in my mid-thirties. So if you've written it off, it might just be the formula. Some of the newer ones are genuinely fine to wear daily. The thing nobody really mentions is that hormonal shifts across summer — more activity, more heat, sometimes more stress — can affect your skin from the inside as much as from the outside. I started paying more attention to hydration and certain nutrients in my luteal phase specifically because that's when I notice the most sensitivity and dullness regardless of what I put on my face. Still figuring it out to be fair, it's not like I've solved anything.