Are saunas good for your skin?
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There’s been a back and forth about saunas and if they’re good for your health, both body and mind, and how saunas affect your skin. All signs point to yes, with numerous benefits that are possible through proper sauna usage. Yet there are some precautions to take and to understand the signs out there if you're in the sauna too much.
Preparing to use a sauna
Keep in mind that you need to understand that saunas are going to get you really hot. That’s what they’re meant to do, and it's meant to bring about a state of a calm mind and to sweat to rejuvenate your body.
With all that sweating, it's important to enter a sauna in a healthy non-intoxicated state with plenty of clean water in your system. Otherwise, when the sweating begins, you'll simply be overheating, and that's a potential issue. It's also a great idea to bring some water with you or have it readily available if you think you haven't consumed enough.
Then it’s all about preparing the skin before entering the sauna. Remember all that sweating? Well, you want to make sure that all the makeup, oil, and current sweat are eliminated. You'll want to apply any types of cleansers to major areas (such as acne on your face or body) beforehand, as this will help to keep those areas clean right before the sauna activates its rejuvenation powers.
You'll also want to activate the pores through an abrasion process so that when the heavy sweating starts to happen, then you will clean out those pores.
How does it help with skin issues?
All that sweating is helping with detoxification as it's pushing out all the bad stuff in your skin. This helps as a restorative and rejuvenation process with your skin as it stays extremely clean. At the same time, all that sweat is helping to increase skin cell generation, allowing for younger and healthier skin to come out on a more frequent basis.
The circulation benefits of a sauna compound this. With all that heat, your blood circulation is working as smoothly as possible, and with all that blood flowing as the capillaries are expanding, that helps to allow this. This helps with collagen production while healing your skin, thus helping combat wrinkles and offering numerous anti-aging benefits.
It's not just to make you look and feel younger; using a sauna regularly also helps with inflammation of the skin. In addition, for those that suffer from eczema or psoriasis, a sauna provides comfortable relief from these conditions.
Keep in mind, though, that when you're in a sauna, the heat that's produced is dry heat to help induce a proper sweat, and that sweat is filled with salt as well. This can, at times, cause additional irritation to sensitive skin types.
Always either check with your dermatologist or trial some sauna sessions to see how your skin reacts in general, especially around those sensitive skin areas.
An important benefit of what a sauna can do
Although we’re discussing how a sauna helps to naturally heal and bring back life to your dry or poorly managed skin, there’s one benefit that helps not only other aspects of your health but helps with your skin as well. This is the natural benefit of stress reduction. Being in a sauna on a regular basis helps you disconnect from the world (no smartphones will be with you), and that's only the first part. As the heat picks up, you'll start to take in deeper, more rejuvenating breaths that will eventually calm you down to a level of peace.
Combined with the improved blood flow and circulation, your stress levels will almost feel as if they are melting away as you're only focusing on sitting or laying down and simply sweating out all the accumulation of toxic elements within your skin.
Stress reduction alone should be a focus for everyone in their lives, and with all the added benefits that a sauna can help with your skin, it should be part of everyone's regular routine when possible. Some of the skin-related issues can be triggered or activated by stress as the body tries to combat the heightened status that stress ends up putting on our bodies. This is especially true with those that have eczema or psoriasis.
What to do after a good sauna
An important note is that if you want to be able to have the right type of sauna experience, there are things that need to be done afterward. First, make sure you’re rehydrating yourself as you’ve lost a lot of liquid through the sauna itself. Then it's all about making sure you take a shower as fast as possible after it.
There's a lot of salt from the sweat, and it'll stay in liquid form only so long. Wash that salt off, and don't let it settle into a solid state. Otherwise, your skin may get irritated. In addition, don't do anything to introduce toxins after a sauna, such as drinking alcohol or doing any type of recreational drug. You need the kind of your body to regulate itself back to a normal temperature.
Should I get a sauna in my home?
Now that you know a regular sauna experience is almost a necessity to ensure a healthy skincare routine, as well as a natural option for eliminating stress, you want to ask yourself, how can you do it more often? One way is to consider getting yourself a sauna constructed in your home. You may think you need a dedicated space or some type of specialized equipment, but that's not always the case.
Getting yourself an in-house sauna from us here at Innovative Saunas and Cellars means you’ll get the right sauna for your home every time. We work to develop with you the ideal sauna with the space allocation that you have. That means everything is custom from the ground up, and only you will have that sauna. It's intended to fit in any spare location, whether it's an entirely empty room or as a subset of a large master bathroom.
The options are only restricted by the visions of what your dream sauna is. We also work with the latest technological solutions with saunas and can even install infrared saunas. This means you'll be getting a more scientific approach to the health benefits of a sauna, as you have different wavelengths penetrating your body and providing different types of health benefits. All the while, you're still getting the benefits of the sweating and detox of a traditional sauna.
Don’t spend time going to a shared sauna at a gym that might not be as hygienic as your sauna at your house. You also don’t have to share your sauna with anyone you don’t want to, so you’re able to enjoy the full effects of a sauna without worrying about the strangers that are inside with you.
Get that right mix of privacy and health benefits that a sauna can provide.