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The least comfortable thing about winter, at least for me, has never been the cold itself. It’s the way the bitterly dry air saps my skin of moisture relentlessly from just before the holidays until the first warm days of spring.
And having dull, dry skin isn’t just aesthetically displeasing—it can also be painful. Even with two humidifiers going in my home around the clock, I still experience cracks in the skin between my fingers, something I’m certain has been exacerbated by how much more frequently I’m washing my hands. Slathering on a standard-issue lotion after showers isn’t always a reliable way to keep this condition at bay.
Enter a new product from Osea, a Malibu-based clean skincare company whose products include vegan ingredients derived from the sea. I’ve been using the brand’s new Undaria Algae Body Butter since it launched in January, and it’s done what few other lotions have been able to do for me: heal and reverse the dry skin that typically plagues me at this time of year.
That’s thanks as much to its ingredients as its formulation. This stuff is rich in shea butter and glycerin, two notably moisturizing components, as well as oat kernel extract, which helps your skin preserve its moisture barrier. The ingredient in the titular role, undaria algae, is lauded for its antioxidant properties and can help fight off free radicals. As for its texture, this stuff is thicker than a bowl of oatmeal, to borrow a beloved phrase from the culture. But that’s part of its magic. You can’t put on a light layer of this stuff, and its luxurious texture makes you feel like you’ve really sealed in moisture.
If I had a complaint, it would be that its application can be somewhat laborious. You scoop it out of a frosted glass jar, and rubbing it into your skin can feel somewhat like frosting a cake—albeit one that smells alluringly of winter citrus and makes your knees look like you’ve been in a rainforest, not a tundra. But it beats having dry skin by a mile.
