How Does Hard Water Affect Your Skin?

How Does Hard Water Affect Your Skin?

If you’re experiencing dry, cracked, and damaged skin, hard water may be the culprit.

With its higher mineral content, hard water can affect your skin from the outside in and inside out.

• When you shower, the minerals in your hard water can leave a residue on your skin.
  • You’ll notice this if you have trouble building a lather with soaps and shampoos.
• When you drink hard water, these minerals are ingested and integrated into your blood (and thus, all body systems).
  • The minerals we’re talking about aren’t harmful at reasonable levels. Hard water minerals are typically calcium and magnesium.

However, you may not want these excess minerals coating your body.

Hard Water Can Lead to Itchy, Irritated Skin

Calcium and magnesium in your water can lead to a breakdown in your skin’s protective barrier.

This can turn into easier access for harmful bacteria.

The bacteria and the skin damage that caused it could be what is making you itchy and irritated.

More Water Makes Your Skin Drier?

Yep! If it’s hard water, it can dry out your skin.

It all comes back to minerals and their effect on the pH balance of your skin.

Your skin has natural oils that help protect it.

When you bathe, you’re stripping away these oils along with pore-clogging pollutants.

It ALL goes down the drain.

What makes hard water so aggravating is that it leaves skin-drying minerals behind.

This leads to more pore clogging and skin damage.

How to Reduce or Remove Hard Water

A good water softener in a home filtration system will do the trick.

It does require a technician or plumber to install it, but it’s worth it for your skin’s health.

Our recommendation is Pentair Water Solutions, based in Minnesota.

They have a range of water filtration systems for households of different sizes.

You can access free information about their filters on our Filters page.