How to Treat Fungal Infection & Crusty Dry Skin Around Nose

Crusty dry skin around your nose is often a sign of a fungal overgrowth called seborrheic dermatitis. While every person has harmless yeast living on their face, when there’s too much of that yeast it turns your skin crusty, especially around your nose. Let’s show you how to tame the fungus and clear up your skin.

Step-by-Step Treatment Plan for Crusty Dry Skin

Getting rid of the extra yeast can be done with a straightforward, 2-step skincare routine.

Step 1: Cleanse

Wash your face gently every day with a targeted cleanser. Look for cleansers that include the active ingredients zinc pyrithione, ketoconazole, or selenium sulfide. You’ll also benefit from a cleanser with 3% salicylic acid, which breaks down and lifts away the sticky, crusty dry skin that’s built up around your nose.

Try this cleansing bar from PCA Skin that’s specifically formulated for flaking and crusty skin with salicylic acid. To use it during your daily cleanse, moisten the enclosed sponge to create a foaming lather, then massage it gently into the creases near your nose. Let the lather sit on your skin for two minutes before rinsing it off with warm water. Those two minutes of contact lets the salicylic acid get deep enough into your skin to do its work.

Step 2: Go Oil-Free

When you have this yeast buildup on your face, the flakiness and redness might make you think your skin is dry. So you apply moisturizers and hydrators, but the flakiness and crustiness only gets worse. 

That’s because the yeast that causes seborrheic dermatitis feeds off your skin’s natural oils. If you add moisturizers with more oils, you’re just feeding the yeast and helping it grow more. The solution is to starve the yeast by using only oil-free moisturizers and hydrators.

So step 2 in your skincare routine is to moisturize smartly. Look for a product that says oil-free, such as this one from Glo Skin which uses algae and hyaluronic acid to deliver moisture deep into your skin. It’s a great basic moisturizer you can always use for skin that’s prone to crustiness.

If you want to go even stronger, you can spring for a probiotic moisturizer. Probiotics can be very beneficial for helping your skin’s microbiome balance itself, which means you’re strengthening your skin against future fungal flares.

For the added defense of a probiotic option, this hydrator from Glowbiotics will work to both starve the yeast and build your skin’s defense for the long-term. 

How to Prevent Fungal Crust from Returning

Once you’ve gotten into a routine of cleansing and moisturizing properly, you should see a rapid improvement in the crusty dry areas around your nose. The trick is to continue caring for your skin so that the yeast buildup doesn’t happen again.

Crustiness around your nose happens easily after sweating if the sweat isn’t washed off right away. The dampness of sweat helps the yeast on your skin grow. And once the sweat evaporates, it leaves salt behind, which further irritates your skin.

So, sweat rules:

• Always wash off sweat with lukewarm water as soon as possible, then pat dry. (No need to use your PCA Skin bar, water is enough to remove the sweat.)

• If you know you’ll be sweating heavily, whether because of a workout or because you’re going somewhere hot, try to avoid wearing face makeup. Makeup mixed with sweat can trap the yeast into your nose creases and cause a fungal flare-up.

Even once your flare-up is totally gone, be conscious of the products you use for the skin around your nose. Keep away from heavy cosmetics and thick creams, especially products that are formulated with oil, even if they’re plant oils. You can also benefit from keeping up your antifungal cleanse once or twice a week, so you stop any extra yeast growth in its tracks, before it can develop into a full-blown crusty problem.