Ayurvedic skin types
What your Ayurvedic skin type reveals about your skin.
Ayurveda describes the universe through the 5 gross elements, which combine to form the 3 doshas: vata, pitta, kapha. And because everything can be defined by these elements, so can our bodies and skin.
While we carry each element—space, air, fire, water, and earth—inside of us, we each have them in different proportions. This unique arrangement makes us who we are. It makes our skin the way it is.
The arrangement we’re born with is our natural constitutional state. But, as we go through our day, seasons, life, our skin is influenced by uncontrollable factors, such as seasons and life stages, and controllable factors, such as lifestyle, stress, sleep, and diet. These factors all leave their imprints on our skin. Our job is to influence what we can control and manage what we can’t. In other words, managing your skin is about bringing it back into balance.
Your Ayurvedic skin type: a generalized blueprint
Typical vata skin qualities
Typical pitta skin qualities
Soft, oily/moist (but not as much as kapha), warm, fair, red or yellowish, freckles, moles, medium thickness, prone to photosensitivity
Typical kapha skin qualities
Most oily/moist, cool, smooth, soft, thick, more resilient to/later wrinkling
Imbalanced vata skin
Excess dryness (not related to heat, cool to touch) and/or roughness, fine lines, scaliness, increased sensitivity to cold, dull complexion, a feeling that the skin lacks nourishment
Imbalanced pitta skin
Know what you can and cannot control
Skin factors you can control
Regardless of your skin type, there is evidence that poor sleep and chronic stress will affect your skin barrier recovery and other markers of skin aging. In addition, a systematic review found that the increase of dietary water intake may increase stratum-corneum hydration, but concluded that the evidence was limited and the underlying mechanism remained unclear.
In Ayurveda, your doshic composition explains why the same factor may affect people differently. For example, Ayurveda views insufficient sleep or hydration as more likely to increase vata qualities such as dryness, therefore, expecting to have a bigger effect on someone with a naturally vata skin type rather than someone with kapha skin type.
Or, someone with a primarily pitta skin type spending too much time in the sun or heat may experience excessive sweating, redness, and heat-related breakouts or blotchy skin.
The foods you eat will influence your skin, too. Ayurveda explains that pungent foods have a heating effect on your body and can aggravate pitta. If you’re a pitta person consuming too much spicy food, your skin may experience pitta imbalances sooner and to a larger extent than a vata or kapha person would.
Skin factors we cannot control
While we have our individual body constitution and skin composition that we were born with, time is an uncontrollable factor. We all age.
In the first, early phase of life, we’re in building mode. And so is our skin. Regardless of your skin type, you’ll have more collagen, elasticity, hydration, and so on, leaving your skin feel supple and smooth. This is the kapha phase of our skin.
As adults, we’re mostly in the pitta phase of our life until we start shifting to the vata phase of life. This transition from the transformation phase to catabolic (breakdown) phase of life is associated in Ayurveda with increasing vata.
From a modern perspective, aging is also accompanied by changes in skin hydration, elasticity, collagen, and firmness. There’s good literature supporting age-related collagen loss and changes in elasticity, and particularly strong evidence around menopause.
For women, this transition often overlaps with menopause and the years surrounding it. Declining estrogen around menopause contributes to decreased collagen production, reduced elasticity and moisture loss, with dryness and wrinkling among the resulting skin changes.
Even though we can’t control time, we can control how we prepare for and manage it. Actively incorporating lifestyle and diet choices that support overall health, and therefore, skin health, and following a skincare routine that supports the skin rather than works against it becomes especially important before, during, and after life-stage transitions. As part of your skincare routine, consider a regular facial or facial marma point massage, fascia release, and other skin-revitalizing techniques to complement your topical skincare products.
Explore the glossary for deeper Ayurvedic definitions:
https://redpantz.com/glossary/
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