June 5th, 2026

Finding ways to stay cool when the weather heats up is essential for a clear, calm complexion. Cooling foods are an excellent way to avoid breakouts, flushing, and bumps this season! In addition to turning on air conditioning and fans, taking cool showers or baths, wearing lightweight clothing, and switching up what you eat can be especially helpful for combatting the effects of the scorching heat.

Why Skin Suffers from Heat

Dehydration and electrolyte loss due to excessive heat and sweating can dampen your enjoyment of summer, aggravating acne, rosacea, and other skin concerns. Overheated skin can become flushed and develop heat rash, with red, irritated skin punctuated by small, raised bumps. Sweat may block the ducts leading from sweat glands to the skin’s surface, triggering inflammation within your body and heat rash on your skin.

Cooling Foods

To help control breakouts, rosacea flare-ups, and other heat-triggered problems, finding your favorite cooling food for skin health is a delicious way to beat the heat this summer. So, let’s get in the kitchen to find what to eat to stay cool in summer and maintain a serenely radiant complexion that stands up to unforgiving summer rays:


Avocados: Despite their creamy richness, mono-unsaturated fatty acids in avocados may help expel toxins and excess heat from the blood and moisturize your skin from within.


Coconut Water: Drinking coconut water, enriched with vitamins, minerals, and hydrating properties, is a great way to stay cool during the Summer.


Citrus Fruits: Lemons, limes, grapefruits, and oranges are filled with fiber and high amounts of water, which may help counteract overheated bodies and skin. Bromelain, an enzyme in citrus fruits, helps reduce inflammation within the body and promotes healthy cell turnover, making sliced oranges, citrus-infused sparkling waters, and reduced sugar lemonade or limeade thirst and heat-quenching solutions! Pineapples are another excellent source of bromelain, making pineapple wedges a tasty summer snack.


Cucumbers: Their high water content helps hydrate and cool the body. They also contain potassium and magnesium to promote balanced hydration. You can also topically “cool,” moisturize, and soothe your skin with cucumber-infused products, like Pevonia’s Balancing Combination Skin Cream for combination skin or YouthRenew™ Tinted Cream with sun protection.


Melons: Watermelon, cantaloupe, honeydew, and other melon varieties are ideal for beating the heat! They have exceptionally high amounts of water, vitamins B6, C, and K, and potassium, which are essential for balancing the body. Watermelon, a member of the cucumber family, contains 91.45% water and is rich in antioxidants, making it a refreshing, hydrating, and cooling must-have for the body and skin.


Onions: This spicy, fiber-rich vegetable counterintuitively provides cooling properties and can help the body fight off acidity.


Yogurt: This nutritious fermented dairy product is more than just a nutritious and delicious food; it coats and soothes the stomach, draws out heat, and regulates body temperature.


Bananas: A favorite sweet fruit worldwide and a great source of fiber, bananas also help reduce acidity and may clear out toxins, promoting cooler intestinal “heat.”


Green Vegetables: Fiber and water-rich Chinese cabbage, kale, spinach, and lettuce deliver a cooling effect on the body from within.


Mint: This popular herb is excellent in drinks, salads, and other dishes while offering a wonderfully refreshing and a cooling, calming effect within the body and the skin.


Fish: One of the better lean proteins to eat during the sizzling summer, fish with Omega-3 fatty acids is one of the best cooling foods for red, irritated skin. Fish is healthy and light and won't make you sluggish (so long as it isn’t battered or prepared with heavy sauces). Omega-3s also keep blood pressure levels in check, helping control the fiery hot flashes and their ensuing skin irritations. Vegans can get these benefits from flax as well!


Fresh Produce: Additional fresh fruits and vegetables to be cool this summer include peaches, strawberries, celery, sweet peppers, tomatoes, and zucchini.

Cool Ayurvedic and Chinese Medicine

Ancient Ayurvedic and Chinese Medicine provide additional insight and options to stay cool and maintain a healthy, calm complexion.

Ayurvedic Cooling Foods

In Ayurvedic medicine, people are believed to have one of three doshas—energies thought to govern the body’s physiological activity—each benefiting from certain foods to balance these energies. The pitta dosha, governed by fire and water, bears similarities to the summer season. Humidity, oiliness, and skin irritations reflect the nature of this dosha, along with the agitation, sluggish digestion, and sour stomach often exhibited during this season. Cooling foods for pitta include natural fruits, root vegetables, squash, most grains, milk, and ghee. These foods commonly prescribed by ayurvedic practitioners to balance this fiery dosha can also be helpful to cool the body during the summer.

Cooling Foods Chinese Medicine

Chinese medicine recognizes many vegetables for their refreshing yin effect on the body. In addition to cucumbers, one of the most cooling foods for acne, greens (chicory, dandelion, endive, rocket, spinach, Swiss chard, and watercress), asparagus, artichokes, broccoli, cauliflower, green beans, and peas are believed to disperse body heat. Additional nutrient-rich foods deemed cooling in this revered healing therapy (on top of those already mentioned) include apples, eggs, and green tea.

Cooling Foods for Menopause

Minimize pre- to post-menopausal breakouts, sweating, and flushing from hot flashes with the following cooling foods for hot flashes this summer:

• Fruits: Apricots, grapes, pears, kiwi

• Nuts & Seeds: Cashews and flaxseeds

• Whole Grains: Buckwheat, oats, spelt, rye, wheat

• Vegetables: Bell pepper, carrots, green beans, zucchini

Skip spicy foods, alcohol, and caffeine to prevent becoming a summer inferno!

The Perfect Cooling Accompaniment: Skin Cooling Skincare

Skin and body care with cooling skincare ingredients perfectly complement your cooling summer diet. Here are our top picks for beating the heat:

• Calming skincare products with green tea will help subdue flushing, redness, and irritation seen with skin flare-ups in the summer.

• Sunburn or not, our After-Sun Soothing Gel protests the fallout of the summer swelter.

• Put a freeze on breakouts with gentle products that quell irritation from clogged pores. Skincare products with tea tree will have an especially cooling effect.

• Be prepared for occasional blemishes from heat waves with a clean skincare mask with camphor stocked in your skincare first aid kit.

• For an extra chill factor, refrigerate a refreshing skin mist and spritz whenever temperatures spike and skin begins to feel tight or look irritated.

• Our Men's Line is the ultimate unisex crossover, uniting people of all genders against the adverse effects of blistering weather.

• Slather our mint-infused Tension Relief Gel on “hot spots” like your feet and the back of your neck for a cooling reprieve. It is also ideal for extinguishing hot-flash flames.

Summer Recipe Ideas

Safeguard your complexion this season to help control breakouts, flare-ups, and other heat-triggered problems with these cooling meals for summer:

• Chillin’ Summer Salad: Toss leafy greens, diced onions, chopped cucumbers, watermelon, mint, and other water-rich vegetables in a lemon juice, olive oil, and avocado dressing.

• Cool Ceviche: Throw shade on hot spells with sushi-grade fish, tomatoes, onions, and avocados.

Summer Drinks

As caffeine and alcohol consumption contribute to dehydration, try these alternatives to popular summer beverages like iced coffee and beer.

• Pina Colada Mocktail: Coconut water, pineapple, and banana blended into a cooling smoothie.

• No-jito Cooler: Green tea or coconut water infused with lime and mint.

If you are what you eat, why not try cooling foods to be calm, cool, and collected this summer?