Moisturizer for oily skin in summer, and the autumn handover

By the third week of a Korean summer the cream that was fine in April is showing up on your face at four in the afternoon. Not as hydration. As a slick.

The usual response is to buy something labelled for oily skin and hope. The more useful response is to work out which single property of the jar stopped fitting, because it's almost never the hydration and almost always the seal.

Of the moisturizers in our reading with an occlusion level recorded, 40 sit at medium, 31 at light and 3 at heavy. That middle bar is where most of the market lives, and it's the bar that stops working when the air gets thick.

What actually changes in summer

Two things, and only one of them is about your skin.

Humid air slows water loss from the surface all by itself. The job your cream was doing in February, which was standing between your face and dry indoor air, is partly being done for free in August. A seal that was proportionate in winter is now surplus, and surplus seal has nowhere to go except onto the surface where you can see it.

Sebum output climbs with skin temperature too. That part is real and it's smaller than people assume, and it compounds with the first thing rather than causing it on its own.

So the change you want is a change to occlusion.

Not to hydration. The humectant block near the top of a Korean moisturizer list is doing the same job in every season, and cutting it because your face looks greasy is how people end up with skin that's shiny and tight at the same time. That combination is the one the picks list for oily and combination skin was built around, and summer is when it shows up most.

The ladder you're moving down

Think of it as three rungs rather than a switch.

Heavy is a small population. Three of the 81 moisturizers we have a reading for, all of them built around a lipid deck for skin that cracks in winter. If you're on one of those in July, that's the easy call.

Medium is where most creams sit and where most people are. Forty of the 81. A medium occlusion cream in humid weather isn't a mistake so much as a mismatch, and moving one rung is usually the entire fix.

Light is the summer rung, at 31 of the 81, and it's where every gel cream we have read sits without exception.

The reason that last sentence holds is construction rather than marketing. A gelled water base with a little spreading emollient has a ceiling on how much it can seal, which is a limitation in January and the point in August. If you're choosing between formats rather than between rungs, the occlusion difference between a gel cream and a lotion is the thing worth checking first.

One rung is usually enough. Two rungs, from medium straight to nothing, is the overcorrection that produces the tight and shiny result.

What not to drop when you go lighter

The sunscreen, obviously, and that one has its own problem in summer.

A lighter moisturizer under a sunscreen leaves less for the sunscreen to catch on, which is a real benefit and not the one people notice. The one they notice is that the whole stack now slides by noon, which is usually a total volume problem rather than a product problem. We went through the mechanics of that in what pills, what slides and what to layer instead, and the summer version of the answer is less of everything with a real pause between layers.

Do not drop the water bringing step either.

If anything it matters more, because a light cream holds less and needs something underneath worth holding. Toner or essence or a thin serum, whichever you already own, patted in and given thirty seconds.

Do not switch cleansers upward. A stronger wash in summer is the most common self inflicted injury in this whole category, and it works for about four days.

And don't add a second active because your skin is behaving differently. Heat plus a new acid is how a manageable July turns into a bad August, and the routine you had in spring is the one worth keeping the shape of with a lighter last step.

The handover back in autumn

Here is the part almost nobody does on purpose.

The switch to something lighter in June is a decision. The switch back in October isn't, and so it doesn't happen, and people spend a whole winter mildly dry without ever choosing to. Then in February they conclude their skin has changed and buy a serum.

Put a date on it instead of a feeling.

The trigger that works is the weather rather than the calendar, and the specific signal is your face feeling tight within about an hour of your morning routine on a day that isn't especially cold. When that happens twice in a week, move back up one rung.

You don't need a different product for it if you kept the spring one. That's the argument for owning two moisturizers rather than replacing one, and it costs nothing extra over a year because you're using each of them for half of it.

Which one goes back on isn't a hard question. It's the one that felt correct in April.

Common questions

Is a gel cream enough in a Korean summer?

For oily and combination skin, in most conditions, yes. If you're in air conditioning all day the indoor air is dry even when the outdoor air isn't, and that's the case where a light cream in the morning and a slightly heavier one at night makes sense.

Should I skip moisturizer entirely on the worst days?

Skipping it is the move that reads as working for a week and then makes the shine worse. Without something slowing water loss, oil output is the only variable your skin can adjust. Use less rather than none.

What about a moisturizing sunscreen instead of both?

A sunscreen with a decent humectant load can carry the last step on light days, and it comes with a catch worth naming. You'll reapply the sunscreen and you won't reapply a moisturizer, so the two steps have different rhythms. We picked apart which sunscreens survive that in Korean sunscreens for oily skin.

My skin is oily in summer and dry in winter. Is that normal?

Common enough that most of the market is built for it. What it usually means is one skin with a seasonal seal requirement rather than two skin types, and that's why the fix is one rung on the occlusion ladder rather than a whole new shelf.

If you've got a cream you like and can't tell which rung it is on, send us the first eight ingredients and we will place it.