Travel days can take a tremendous toll on your body. There’s the stress, the bloating and the bad sleep the night before. Don’t forget the thin, cramped seats.
Skincare may fall to the bottom of our list of concerns, even though it takes just as much of a hit. Airplane cabins are extremely dehydrating, thanks to the low-humidity, recirculated air — and it can wreak havoc on your skin. Flight attendants and pilots know these issues better than anyone and deal with them on a daily basis.
“Passengers come in the galley asking us, ‘What can we do?’” says Baltimore-based flight attendant Elizabeth Simpson, 30.
These days, Simpson has tips ready for passengers, but when she first started her career, “My skin was a mess,” she says. It took trial and error to nail down a routine that works — a common path for those who work in the air. This is why Ashlee Loree, who’s been a flight attendant for nine years, also recommends asking to veteran flight crew members for their wisdom.
“They know the deal,” she says. “That’s how I learned.”
We took Loree’s advice and spoke to five flight attendants — and a pilot — to get their best advice for keeping your skin on track during travel.
Fight dehydration
The No. 1 takeaway: Drink water. Lots of it. Loree, 33, says a good visual for what that does to her body is seeing the water bottles on her drink cart shrivel up at cruising altitude. “I always try to encourage drinking more water, especially to the new hires,” she says.
Chiropractor-turned-flight attendant Courtney Acree, 40, fully hydrates the night before she travels, drinking as much as she can and adding supplements to her water that include electrolytes, like Liquid I.V.
“I like to start out really hydrated because on the plane we get really busy and can’t be constantly drinking water,” Acree says.
Simpson says there’s an unspoken rule among her Southwest Airlines colleagues to drink two 12-ounce waters for every hour of flight time.
Don’t get stuck buying overpriced water at the airport, and pack your own bottle. After losing one too many overpriced name-brand bottles, Simpson has switched to a collapsible reusable silicone water bottle that shrinks to the size of a pill bottle and attaches to her luggage.
