People who move up from Sydney tend to notice it in the second week of May. The routine that worked perfectly at sea level stops working, and skin that was never particularly dry starts feeling tight by mid-morning.
It isn't imagination. Katoomba sits at around a thousand metres, and that changes several things at once.
What's actually happening
Cold air holds less moisture than warm air, so the air outside is drier. Then you go indoors, where a heater or a fire is actively drying it further. Skin loses water to the air continuously, and in winter it loses it faster than it can replace it.
At altitude there's also measurably more UV, and it reflects off cloud and frost. The winter sun in the mountains is not the gentle thing it feels like through a window — which is why the most important winter product is the one most people put away in April.
The three changes worth making
First, stop stripping. The foaming cleanser that felt bracing in February is now removing lipids your skin can't spare. Move to a cream or milk cleanser for the cold months and switch back in spring.
Second, add water, then seal it. A hydrating serum (hyaluronic acid or similar) applied to slightly damp skin, then a heavier moisturiser over it to hold it there. Serum alone in dry air can actually draw moisture out of the skin rather than into it. The order and the seal matter more than the price of either product.
Third, keep wearing SPF. Every day, cloud or not, indoors near a window or not. If sunscreen feels heavy over a winter moisturiser, that's usually a formula problem rather than a rule problem, and worth solving rather than abandoning.
What we change in the treatment room
Winter is the right season for the treatments you can't easily do in summer. Anything that resurfaces the skin — peels, clinical correction facials, laser — leaves it temporarily more sun-sensitive, and June to August is when that's simplest to manage. It's genuinely the best window of the year to start a course.
LED light therapy earns its place in winter too. It's $79 a session standalone or $59 added to another treatment, requires nothing of your skin barrier, and does useful work on the dullness and stubborn breakouts that show up when everything else has been turned down.
And a hot stone massage in a Katoomba July needs no justification at all.
When it's more than dryness
There's a difference between dry and compromised. Tightness that improves when you moisturise is dryness. Stinging when you apply a product you've used for years, new redness across the cheeks, or flaking that doesn't resolve in a week, is a barrier that needs rebuilding rather than another layer of cream on top.
If that's where you are, stop introducing new actives, simplify back to cleanse and moisturise, and come and see us before you spend money on anything else. Most compromised barriers recover in a few weeks with less done to them, not more.
Then when spring arrives, your skin is in a state where it can actually make use of what you do next.