Beauty may be more than skin deep, but it sure is nice to have beautiful skin anyway. Unfortunately, you may be dealing with common skin issues like wrinkles, sun damage, and stretch marks that make you a little self-conscious when you’re out on a date.
One effective way of taking care of your skin better is to begin a daily skin care regime. However, before you start, you need to know your skin type.
If your skin is flaky, then you have dry skin. If it’s greasy, you have oily skin. If your cheeks are dry, forehead, nose and chin are oily, then you have combination skin. Finally, if your skin burns or itches when you apply makeup or a beauty product, then you have sensitive skin.
Once you know your skin type, you can then decide on the best products to cleanse, exfoliate, and moisturize your skin.
How Skin Ages
Before looking for a solution to wrinkling, it helps to understand why wrinkles form in the first place. Essentially, wrinkles are a sign of skin aging, which causes your skin to undergo radical changes.
When you skin ages, your cells start to divide much more slowly and the dermis, the inner layer of the skin, begins to get thinner, making your skin more vulnerable to damage.
Since this dermis creates the structure for the upper layer of your skin, the epidermis, this layer now starts to get looser and unravel. The result is that your skin looks older, sags, and furrows.
Another reason for wrinkles other than the structural damage to the dermis layer is that the oil secreting glands in the inner skin may shrink, which leaves your skin without a protective cover of oil. In time, your skin’s ability to stay moisturized steadily begins to decrease, and the result is your skin begins to look scaly.
Factors Affecting Skin Aging
Skin aging does not necessarily reflect biological age. You can have skin that looks older than your age.
Here are 3 common factors associated with premature skin aging:
1. Photoaging.
Since sunlight has ultraviolet radiation, exposure to excessive sunlight, as in sunbathing or spending all day surfing, can accelerate skin aging. Scientists have identified two types of ultraviolet radiation that damage the skin: ultraviolet A (UVA) and ultraviolet B (UVB).
Prevention consists of reducing exposure to sunlight and wearing sunscreen with SPF.
Treatment depends on how much the skin has been damaged.
If the damage is not too extensive, with the photodamage only resulting in deep wrinkles, then dermabrasion, chemical peels, laser therapy, and injectable skin fillers can be used to make skin look younger again.
However, if the damage is extensive, and photodamage has resulted in tissue sagging rather than just wrinkling, then the most effective course of action might be cosmetic surgery. Depending on the affected area, you could get a forehead lift, a facelift, or a necklift.
2. Poor Diet.
Eating foods loaded with additives, preservatives, and too much salt, sugar, and fat, can undermine the health of the dermis layer of the skin. This in turn will affect the epidermis, which will form blemishes and wrinkles.
According to a study that was published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, four fruits with the highest “total antioxidant capacity” of any other food were blackberries, blueberries, strawberries, and plums. Samantha Heller, a clinical nutritionist at NYU Medical Center in New York City, explains: “When you help protect the cells from damage and disintegration, you also guard against premature aging. In this respect, these fruits may very well help keep your skin younger looking longer.”
3. Environmental Damage
Apart from sunlight and a poor diet, other factors can also accelerate the creation of wrinkles.
- Cigarette smoke creates free radicals and this causes skin problems.
- Cannabis smoke also affects the skin, causing the skin to not get enough oxygen.
- Air pollution reduces the level of vitamin E levels, and this vitamin is an powerful antioxidant against free radical damage.
Although it’s distressing to get wrinkles, especially if they make you look far older than your actual age, there is plenty you can do to reduce or eliminate them.
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