When I Get Itchy Winter Skin, Here’s What Helps
Key takeaways:
Writer Kellie Gormly has winter eczema that leads to dry, flaky skin on her shins during the colder months.
She tries to manage rough winter skin by staying moisturized.
She also uses an antihistamine to prevent itching.
My Journey is a series of personal essays about what it’s like to cope with a medical condition.
For almost 30 years now, I’ve dealt with the maddening torture of skin itching in one form or another. And I have two distinctive types of itching — one of which just happens during the cold months, and just on my lower shins.
It sounds a bit confusing, but I’m just an itchy gal — to put it in economic terms, in both a macro and micro kind of way. Before I get to the winter leg itching and rash, I’ll start at the beginning.
In the late ’90s, I started having intense itching attacks on random parts of my body — often, more than one body part per itching episode. And when I scratched, capillaries under the skin would break, leaving me with a rash that looked like red skidmarks, or even a big bruise from bleeding under the skin.
This generalized itching seemed to come from inside my body, rather than coming from an irritation on the surface of my skin. My skin was never dry or flaky in the itchy spots. But the itching was so intense. I jokingly wished I were a spider with six more hands to scratch during an episode. I felt like I could scratch all the way down to my bones with an SOS pad and still not satisfy the itch.
After many blood tests and many doctors, nobody has been able to specifically diagnose what causes this insane itching, so the name for it is just an idiopathic pruritus, which is the medical term for itching.
Thankfully, for me, prescription antihistamines control this type of itch well. I’ve taken many, and I also took prednisone — a corticosteroid used to treat a variety of skin issues — at times years ago. But I’ve hit my sweet spot with hydroxyzine, an antihistamine that helps treat itching by stopping the effects of a natural chemical in the body called histamine. For at least a decade, I’ve been taking 25 mg of this antihistamine, and so long as I don’t forget to take it once a day, I don’t get this sort of itch.
Managing winter eczema on my shins
My original itching problem started when I lived in hot Texas. After moving north to Pennsylvania in 2002, a new kind of torture emerged when the weather got cold: My shins, especially on the bottom 6 inches or so between my ankles and knees on the front of my legs, got severely dry, flaky and horrendously itchy.
As opposed to the other generalized itch that originated internally, this localized itch starts at the surface of the skin and works its way down.
I scratch it with my fingers, the rough heel skin of the opposite foot, combs, pen caps, and anything I can get my hands on to create friction. As I scratch, the skin turns red and flakes like dandruff. Sometimes, I scratch so hard I break the skin and bleed and leave a scar. The itching is just as intense and maddening as the other kind, but it is limited to this one area and involves very dry skin and flaking.
My dermatologist says that my shin problem is winter eczema, caused when the cold and dry air dry out the top, or corneal, layer of the epidermis. The key to prevention is adequate moisturizing, but for a long time, nothing I used seemed to seal that skin surface. I tried lotions, body butters, body creams, body oil, and sometimes two things at a time. Even if my skin generally felt soft and adequately moisturized, the cold air would somehow break through the very top layer, and I’d have dry flakes on top of otherwise soft, smooth skin. I used prescription Atopiclair cream, which is now available without a prescription. It worked well at stopping an itching outbreak in progress and soothing and healing the damaged skin.
Creams and best tips for eczema relief
But, I wanted to prevent the horrible itching attacks from happening in the first place, by sealing the epidermis to protect it from the cold air.
Nothing I used seemed to do the trick until I started using an over-the-counter emollient cream to trap the moisture. My go-to brand is Eucerin Eczema Relief cream, a colloidal oatmeal skin protectant that contains ceramide-3 and licorice root extract. During the winter, while still damp after a shower, I typically put a scented lotion or cream all over my body except for the shins, which get a generous slathering of the Eucerin. When I do this diligently, it works wonders for prevention. Every time I get an episode of winter eczema on my shins, I realize that I’ve forgotten the Eucerin.
Another technique I use to prevent winter eczema on my shins is refraining from overbathing, which dries out that spot. I shower every day, but not every body part has to be fully soaped up every time — especially if you have this condition and are prone to dry skin. I am a fan of a partial shower a couple times a week, where I only fully soap up key areas that need washing and skip lathering up my lower legs. The water and rinsing suds will still clean my legs, but they will be spared the extra intensity of having soap rubbed on them and getting dried out from too much bathing. It also helps to use lukewarm water instead of hot water, which can really dry out your skin.
One good piece of advice from dermatologists that’s seemingly impossible to follow is to refrain from scratching an itch. But, let’s be honest: Who can resist? However, the itch-scratch cycle is a real thing. Sometimes, the more you scratch an itch, the more it itches, even if the scratch initially satisfies.
Certainly, the best treatment here is prevention of the itch, so that there isn’t anything to scratch. And for that, I swear by my moisturizing cream for my eczema-prone skin.
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