Take skin care into your own hands with easy natural remedies.

RODALE NEWS, EMMAUS, PA—Feel like your bathroom cabinet is overloaded with solutions for dry skin and other epidermal dilemmas? You're not alone. American women spend billions of dollars each year searching for the Fountain of Youth in a jar, and cosmetics companies are more than eager to sell you the next greatest potion. However, dermatologists nowadays are often recommending that people minimize their product usage, in part because there's no evidence that $400 creams are worth their hefty price tag. That's worth considering this spring as you clean out your medicine cabinet and ditch all those expired products that never really met your expectations.

According to a recent survey sponsored by a European skincare company, the primary concern among older women, at least when it comes to their skin, is dryness, followed by wrinkles and a sagging neck. Natural skin remedies for these problems are always worth a try, considering that, quite often, they're free and work just as well as over-the-counter products.

Try these skin salves from the Rodale Remedy Finder before plunking $100 on the latest potion:

• Dry skin. Buy fatty soaps. Standard soaps contain lye, which can be irritating as well as drying, but some soaps, such as Dove, contain extra amounts of fatty materials, such as tallow (animal fat), cocoa butter, lanolin, or even olive oil, and will moisturize better than a pricey cleansing cream or any standard-formula soap. And after you wash up, don't dry your face completely: Moisturizers are more effective when applied to slightly damp skin than to completely dry skin. When it comes to choosing moisturizers, don't assume that expensive creams are more effective. There's no evidence they work better than petroleum jelly or mineral oil, says one dermatologist. However, since those are both derived from nonrenewable petroleum, opt for vegetable oils like sunflower or peanut oil.