What ingredients should you avoid with dry skin?

Alcohol. In skincare, that is, not the gin in your coupe glass (that’s a story for another time). As anyone who’s obsessively hand-sanitized lately will know, alcohol dries the skin out almost immediately. Antibacterial soaps do the same. Avoid perfumes/fragrances, which might be in laundry detergent/softener lingering on your clothes, rubbing against the skin, or any fragrance added to a skincare product, including essential oils (their concentrated form can really irritate the skin).

Benzoyl peroxide “can cause irritation and itching, redness, peeling, all of those things,” adds dermatologist Dr. Hope Mitchell, noting that she sees patients who use a high percentage of it thinking it’ll fight pimples that much stronger, but it ends up drying out the skin. There’s a fine line with salicylic acid, where a high percentage can dry the skin, but a small amount might help chemically exfoliate and soften the skin. Sulfates, which are in most body washes to make them lather up nice and bubbly and remove oil and dirt from the skin can also disrupt the epidermis, warns Dr. Mitchell. “That’s why a lot of us use sulfate-free shampoos, because they actually can be quite drying and disruptive of the scalp. You can become more susceptible to irritants getting into the skin when you’re using products with sulfates.”