Why your skin struggles in winter and what olive ingredients do about it.

Botani olive-based skincare range formulated for dry, sensitive, and barrier-compromised

Every winter, I hear the same story. It starts quietly a little tightness in the morning, some irritation that wasn’t there in summer. Then it builds. "My skin has just changed," you tell me. Nothing is different. Same products, same routine. But something feels wrong. I want to tell you: you are not imagining it. And the answer, often, comes back to olive ingredients for winter skin.

Of course everything has changed. The season has changed. The air has changed. Your skin is doing exactly what it should: reacting. I’ve spent over 27 years watching what the colder months do to skin, and what I want to share today is an honest story about what is happening inside your skin right now and why the olive tree has been the answer I keep coming back to.

What winter is doing to your skin

I always explain it to people the same way. Picture a brick wall. The bricks are your skin cells. The mortar holding them together is a blend of lipids ceramides, fatty acids, sebum. That wall is called the stratum corneum, and it is the only thing standing between your skin and everything the world throws at it.

In winter, cold air holds almost no moisture. Come inside, and the heating makes it worse. What happens next is something called trans-epidermal water loss water evaporating straight through the skin’s surface because the mortar has started to thin. Gaps form. Moisture slips out. Irritants creep in. What you’re feeling is not simply dry skin. It is a compromised barrier. And that distinction is everything because the solution is not just water — it is lipids. The kind that speaks the same language as your skin.

Why olive ingredients for winter skin work at a biological level

Your skin already makes its own squalene a lipid that forms part of the mortar holding your barrier together. The olive makes the same compound. From your late twenties your skin’s production starts to fall, and cold winters suppress it further part of why skin feels so stripped by mid-July. At approximately 410 daltons, olive squalene sits below the 500-dalton threshold at which a molecule can penetrate the stratum corneum and reach the deeper layers where repair happens, rather than sitting on the surface (Bos & Meinardi 2000). It is plant-derived, bio-identical to what your skin already produces, and absorbs without resistance. We also use squalane the stabilised form lighter, longer lasting, zero greasiness.

People rarely talk about the leaf, and I think that is a shame. The olive leaf is one of the most antioxidant-rich botanicals I have worked with one of the reasons I included it in our Olive Repair Cream Olive Repair Cream, Olive Soothing Cream Cleanser, and Olive Hand & Body Cream

. Every time you step into cold air or sit under heating, your skin is quietly generating low-grade free radical damage the kind that wears the barrier down slowly over a whole season. The olive leaf has two key compounds, oleuropein and hydroxytyrosol, that work together to protect skin at a cellular level, inhibiting the enzymes responsible for breaking down collagen and weakening the barrier (Li et al. 2022). If you have redness, rosacea, or skin that reacts to almost everything in winter, this is where olive-derived ingredients do their most important

The whole-body connection

When your skin becomes more reactive in winter, I always look beyond the surface because skin rarely tells only one story.

Skin inflammation does not happen in isolation. I see it season after season people eating less fresh food, drinking less water, carrying more stress. All these things reach the gut microbiome. And the gut microbiome reaches straight back to the skin.

Research in Gut Microbes confirms that microbiome disruption causes measurable inflammatory effects in the skin, with links to atopic dermatitis, acne, and rosacea (Mahmud et al. 2022) a relationship more recent work confirms is two-way (Chai et al. 2024).

I am not asking you to overhaul your life. Just to consider the whole picture. If your skin is flaring despite doing everything right on the outside, it is worth asking what is happening within. More warm broths, fermented foods, herbal teas. Small things — but the quiet changes are often the ones that last.

 

What I recommend

The guidance I give most often for winter skin is simpler than people expect. And it always starts with what to stop not what to add.

The first thing I usually suggest is stopping something, not adding something. Anything that foams aggressively, anything that leaves your face feeling that clean-but-tight way — that sensation is your lipid barrier being pulled apart. The Olive Soothing Cream Cleanser is what I reach for first in winter. It cleanses without disrupting. It is also the one I tell parents to use on their babies that is how gentle it is, and that gentleness is the point.

Then layer with intention. After cleansing, while your skin is still slightly damp not wet, just damp apply your serum first, then seal with a moisturiser or cream. The damp skin step is not optional. It is the difference between actives that absorb and actives that sit on top of a dry surface going nowhere.

If I could only give you one thing for winter, it would be the Olive Skin Serum. It contains both olive squalene and squalane, alongside Vitamin C and E antioxidants. It absorbs in seconds, layers under anything, and addresses the two things winter takes from your skin: barrier lipids and antioxidant protection. Press a few drops into clean, damp skin. Do not rub press. Give it a moment. Then layer over the top. That is, it. That is the routine I have watched transform winter skin repeatedly.

A final thought

We have been told that winter skin is simply something to endure a seasonal inconvenience. I want to gently challenge that. When you understand what is happening at a barrier level, you stop managing and start supporting. That is a different thing entirely.

Olive-based ingredients have been caring for human skin for centuries. My grandmother knew this before I had a word for it. And watching the science arrive to confirm what plant medicine has always held I find that deeply reassuring. If your skin has been struggling this season, I hope this gives you somewhere real to start. Not another product to add. Just a little more understanding of what your skin has been asking for all along.

 

— Barbara Filokostas, Naturopath & Herbalist, Founder of Botani Skincare Australia

References

Bos, JD & Meinardi, MMHM 2000, ‘The 500 Dalton rule for the skin penetration of chemical compounds and drugs’, Experimental Dermatology, vol. 9, no. 3, pp. 165–169.

Chai, J, Deng, F, Li, Y, Wei, X & Zhao, J 2024, ‘The gut-skin axis: interaction of gut microbiome and skin diseases’, Frontiers in Microbiology, vol. 15, article 1427770.

Li, H, He, H, Liu, C, Akanji, T, Gutkowski, J & Li, R 2022, ‘Dietary polyphenol oleuropein and its metabolite hydroxytyrosol are moderate skin permeable elastase and collagenase inhibitors with synergistic cellular antioxidant effects in human skin fibroblasts’, International Journal of Food Sciences and Nutrition, vol. 73, no. 4, pp. 531–542.

Mahmud, MR, Akter, S, Tamanna, SK et al. 2022, ‘Impact of gut microbiome on skin health: gut-skin axis observed through the lenses of therapeutics and skin diseases’, Gut Microbes, vol. 14, no. 1, article 2096995.