| Unsolicited piece of advice #4,387: use moisturizing creme on your skin | to keep it from getting dry and cracking. |
I guess one unsolicited piece of advice deserves another. :)
You leg should have never got to that point. You're not just needing moisturizing cream. You're needing to pay attention to your body... and actually live in it. I'm repeatedly amazed seeing how many people don't actually feel their bodies, letting them get out of shape, eating junk, ignoring posture... Then I turn on the evening news and see ads for drugs to treat hearburn, headache, constipation and sleep problems. None of those things should happen at all under normal circumstances, yet many people think of them as normal.
I think people vary a lot in terms of skin -- whether theirs is sensitive or not. For what it's worth, I like to keep the house very cool in Winter. 62 day/55 night. It's much kinder to skin and sinuses than "room temperature". The relative humidity is higher. It's also conducive to wakefulness. Occasionally in the Winter I get calves dry enough that they itch. Then I put on safflower oil after a shower, mixing it with the water to spread it out. I also like the generic, 365 fragrance-free body lotion at Whole Foods, especially for my hands. It's mainly rapeseed oil. I have a brother who now swears by the blend of petroleum jelly and lanolin used on cow udders, but that would be for extreme skin damage.
If you look at moisturizing creams you'll see that most are merely petroleum jelly with gimmicky trace additives. A few are vegetable oil-based. The former are greasy but protective, good for extreme outdoor exposure or badly damaged skin. The latter are better for daily moisturizing. The prices can go wildly high, with claims of miracle ingredients. (If you look at unit pricing stickers in CVS you'll see that prices go up over $2,000/gallon. Even the most intelligent, level-headed women can be ninnies when it comes to scams in pretty bottles.)
I go to a dermatologist who pushes Amlactin, an absurdly overpriced blend of petroleum jelly and lactic acid. It's all snake oil. But I'm guessing the Amlactin people have some kind of inside connection with dermatologists.
You should exepect to pay a bit more for vegetable oil-based products. The ingredients are higher quality. But there's also a lot of snake oil in that market. In that case it's New Age snake oil and "magic from the East" snake oil, but it's still snake oil. The main ingredient is just oil. I like the cocoa butter or rapeseed oil products because they're closer to human skin oil than petroleum jelly. The latter is greasy and hard to wash off, more for emergency treatment than for moisturizing. As far as I can see, the only reason to prefer creams over plain vegetable oil is that the former seem to have anti-oxidant preservatives. In some cases vegetable oil can go rancid on the skin, producing a sort of bitter smell. But lathering up with plain oil before fully drying off after a shower is an easy, non-greasy way to moisturize the whole body.