Why your skin changes when you move to the UAE

Nobody warns you about this part. You move to the UAE, and within a few months your skin starts behaving like someone else's.

Tightness by mid-afternoon. Makeup catching on patches that were not there last year. A moisturiser that worked perfectly in London or Manila suddenly doing nothing at all.

It is not your imagination, and it is not that your skincare stopped working. It is where you live.

The air here is unusually dry, indoors and out

Two things happen at once in this climate, and they pull in the same direction.

Outside, desert air holds very little moisture. Inside, air conditioning removes more of it, because cooling air is how you dry it. Between the two, most of us spend the day moving from one dehydrating environment to another. Home, car, office, mall, car, home.

An aircraft cabin runs at similar humidity, which is drier than most deserts. Our founder spent years working in one as cabin crew before settling in Dubai, and the thing that struck her was how little changed when she stopped flying. Same tightness, same dryness, same feeling of losing ground.

Why creams alone struggle here

A moisturiser does two useful things. It adds water to the top layer of your skin, and it puts an oil barrier over the top to slow how fast that water leaves.

Both are surface jobs, and both are temporary. In a dry environment the water still leaves, just more slowly. So you top it up, and top it up again, and by evening you are back where you started. That is not a bad product. That is a product doing exactly what it was designed to do, in conditions that work against it all day.

What a cream cannot do is change what your skin is built from. Structure, elasticity and the ability to hold moisture come from proteins your body makes itself, and your body needs specific raw materials to make them.

The vitamin D problem nobody expects

Here is the part that surprises people in one of the sunniest countries on earth.

A 2019 study of 12,346 adults in Abu Dhabi found 72% of Emirati adults were vitamin D deficient. Not because there is no sun, but because of how we actually live here. Indoors most of the day, covered when outside, and sensibly avoiding the hours when the sun is strongest.

Vitamin D contributes to the function of the immune system, and it is one of the nutrients most commonly low in this region. It is why Lovu carries a real 50 mcg of it rather than a token amount.

What actually helps

Keep your moisturiser. It is doing useful work. But if the climate is working on your skin from the outside every day, it makes sense to support it from the inside too.

• Vitamin C contributes to collagen formation for the function of your skin. Without it, collagen synthesis does not happen properly at all.
• Zinc contributes to the maintenance of your skin, hair and nails.
• Biotin contributes to the maintenance of your hair.
• Vitamin E contributes to the protection of cells from oxidative stress, which matters in a climate with this much sun and dust.
• Amino acids such as glycine and glutamic acid are the raw material your body uses to build its own collagen.

That is the thinking behind Lovu. Fourteen active ingredients, every dose printed on the label, in two strawberry gummies a day.

How long it takes, honestly

Longer than anyone selling to you would like to admit.

Nails usually change first, around weeks four to six, simply because they grow out fastest and you can see the new growth. Hair takes roughly eight weeks. Skin is slowest of the three, somewhere between eight and twelve weeks, because skin cells turn over on their own schedule and nothing speeds that up.

One bottle is 30 days. Plan for two or three before you judge it. Anyone promising you a new face in seven days is not being straight with you. Individual results vary.

If you are wondering whether these formulas actually do anything, we looked at the evidence properly, and there is more on why glutathione and collagen belong together.

This article is general information, not medical advice. Food supplements are not a substitute for a varied diet and a healthy lifestyle. If you are pregnant, breastfeeding or taking medication, speak to your doctor first.