We have lots of natural topical creams for dry skin to choose from. Most of the hundreds of creams for getting rid of dry skin on the market seem to claim at least one ingredient that is “natural!” and supposed to work wonders.

Our goal is simple: find effective creams for dry skin that are good values.

Actually doing that can be frustrating, though. Most of us have wasted a lot of money trying one new miracle product after another that didn’t live up to its claims.

We can have bothersome dry skin anywhere on the body: hands, legs, and most often, and most annoying, our faces. Then there’s combination skin, which also seems most common on our faces: dry areas over much of it, oily patches in embarrassing locations.

Creams for getting rid of dry skin anywhere on the body must contain effective hydrating ingredients.

Some of those effective ingredients include avocado and macademia oils, and Manuka honey, the natural product of bees feeding on nectar from the New Zealand Manuka bush, also called the tea tree. These ingredients can penetrate deeply into the layers of our skin and produce a genuine, lasting hydration.

Although these natural oils are soothing and hydrating to our skin, not all natural topical creams for dry skin are effective. Some are terrible.

Mineral oil is the perfect example of a bad ingredient that’s used everywhere in dry skin creams because it’s cheap and plentiful, like its first cousin, petrolatum (petroleum jelly). Mineral oil has the scary quality of making our skin dependent on it. Try to stop after using it for a while and our skin actually becomes drier than before we ever started using it!

Mineral oil and petrolatum are both byproducts of manufacturing gasoline and both tend to clog pores so our skin cannot naturally breathe. Clogged pores can lead to acne flare-ups; even if they don’t, clogged pores are unnatural and unhealthy for our skin.

There are other culprits among the oils commonly used in creams for getting rid of dry skin, but refusing to accept a product with those two ingredients will often eliminate many of the other “bad guys” too. That’s even without doing any further research. (Always a good idea — if we have the time!)

Just keep in mind that our skin is naturally porous, it must breathe, and it can absorb and carry into the blood stream some of the ingredients we apply in a dry skin cream — so we want to avoid the harmful oils as well as apply the soothing, healing ones.

Some of the winners;

– Wakame is definitely one. Phytessence wakame, a kelp variety native to the Japanese Sea, is an especially effective ingredient for soft, supple, youthful skin.

– An expensive ingredient found in top-quality dry skin products is Cynergy TK™. In some lab studies, it has shown a 14% improvement in skin moisture retention in less than three weeks.

– For more tips on finding natural topical creams for dry skin, check out my website.