I also belief that hydratation is important. Here’s a post of me about it: Skin hydration & Moisturizers
In my case, using a moisturiser by itself or a humidifier, couldn’t clear my skin. A moisturizer did improve my skin like maybe 10 to 20% (if I had to give a very rough estimate, whereas Soolantra would be like 90% to 95%), and I still use a moisturizer twice a day as some kind of maintenance regimen (now that my skin is clean). In my case, a humidifier was probably much less effective than a moisturizer.
The effectiveness of a humidifier in increasing the humidity highly depend on the size of the room, how much it’s ventilated and the humidification capacity of the humidifier. In bad conditions, the effect of a humidifer can be near zero in increasing the humidity. In good conditions, it can increase like 20% or maybe 30%. But this difference can also be achieved by moving from winter to summer (depending on where you live).
Choosing a good humidifier is very difficult because it’s difficult to translate humidifier specs to room specs. Also, there are a number of different humidifier categories, and each category has its own drawbacks, like white dust (effecting your breath and room cleaning), high energy usage, usability and noise. I’m using an ultrasonic humidifier combined with a device to purify the water, so that I don’t have white dust (and it’s low on energy usage and pretty quiet).
That’s also something I wonder about. Cleaning the face with a facewasher flushes of some bacteria, cleans the face from dirt, but also makes the skin drier and a bit more prone. It maybe results in less bacteria, but it also makes it easier for bad bacteria to penetrate the skin barrier. Moisturization increases the skin barrier protection, but also makes it easier for bacteria to colonize the skin. (As long as those are good bacteria, it maybe is no problem.)
Also bacteria can colonize the moisturizer product. So I prefer small tubes over large tubes, so that I can replace them more often with a clean moisturizer tube. And I avoid jar like products, because that would be the easiest type for bacteria to colonize. The best package would be a pump product, sealing off the moisturizer from the environment, but the moisturizer that works for me, isn’t available in that form.
Which moisturizer are you using?
Btw, have you tried Soolantra? It’s the primary solution on this forum.