Why can’t we use only water to moisturize our skin when moisturizing is basically putting water back to our skin?
In: Biology
Because your skin doesn’t use purely water to stay “moist”. Your skin uses oils to keep itself supple and stretchable. Soap when coupled with aggressive band continued scrubbing will remove a lot of these oils and dry out the skin. You’ll notice that effect the most where the body has no sweat glands like the knees and elbows. Even if you were submerged in water that skin wouldn’t magically become moisturized.
Lotions use oils (like coconut oil) and other chemicals to replace the natural oils your body uses. Allowing your skin to stay soft even when it’s lacking the natural oil it needs.
As an aside: that’s why during the current covid 19 crisis, when you wash your hands frequently you may want to consider supplementing your hand washing with moisturizer after wards at least once a day or your hands could become dry and cracked.
It has to do with the amount of “stuff” in water and cells along with oils. Our cells inherently have things inside of them ranging from electrolytes to the cell parts. While water has essentially just water. As a result water flows into cells to balance the amount of water on each side which causes cells to become too big and burst.
On the other side water also has no oils. We have sweat glands all along our skin which keep that protective barrier and the skin soft and elastic. When we moisturize most lotions are oil-based and aid our skin in keeping that protective barrier. As a result we feel our skin smooth and soft but really it’s just adequate oiling of our skin like a baseball glove.
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