How Does Skin Age And How Can You Slow Down Aging Of Your Skin?
Your epidermis thins as you grow older, because of a loss of elastin tissue. Elastin tissue is connective tissue that’s found in your body. It provides many tissues the ability to stretch and contract, like elastic, and still keep their original shape. It’s basically like a coil or spring that stretches then bounces back into place.
Elastin is found in the internal organs throughout your body, including blood vessels, heart, lungs, intestines, tendons and ligaments. And it’s found in external organs including your extracellular skin matrix.
Elastin and Collagen Are Keys To Help Keep Your Skin Looking Young
While elastin keep things stretchy, collagen, which is 80% of your dermis, gives your skin strength. Elastin fibers keep your skin tight, and collagen fibers keep it firm. Together, collagen and elastin are the primary fibers that make up the support structure of your skin.
As you grow older, your collagen levels steadily decrease. This ongoing decrease of collagen and elastin starts happening as early as your 20’s.
How Can You Slow Down or Stop Skin Aging?
There are many ways you can slow down the aging of your skin, and there are even ways to stop your skin from aging. In fact, there are ways y
ou can actually reverse the signs of aging of your skin.
One way to do this is by stimulating your fibroblast cells. These are the cells that create both elastin and collagen. Fibroblast cells are located in the dermis layer of your skin, which is also known as the papillary level, or the outer layer. Externally, fibroblast cells can be activated by the use of various peels including glycolic acid skin peels. There are also a number of effective skin creams that help give you younger looking skin by stimulating your collagen, by activating fibroblast cells.
Why You Should Protect Your Skin From Premature Aging By Shielding It From The Sun
The biggest skin aging culprit is the sun. Your skin’s outer, or epidermal layer of skin has built-in protectors in its cells called the pigment melanin. The sun has powerful UV rays that break down the melanin in your skin, leading to premature aging. This includes a visible increase in wrinkles, sun spots and pigmentation, caused by a break down in your elastin, and progressively deterioration of your skin texture.
This does NOT mean you must completely stay out of the sun. You just have to be very prudent about the exposure you give your skin to the sun’s UV and ultraviolet rays, and apply SPF to help mitigate the damage.
Hats are your best friend. Applying SPF or higher to your skin consistently, can help protect it as well. A number of excellent SPF creams on the market can help keep your skin radiant and young.
What Can You Do To Reverse Damage To Your Skin?
There are many ways you can treat your skin to improve it’s health, texture and appearance, and you can do this at any throughout your life. You can exfoliate your skin regularly, to remove the dead or dry skin cells that may clog your healthy cells and pores, or slow down healthy skin cell turnover. You can wash the daily toxins off your face every night, and apply creams containing healthy vitamins and retinoids. These steps will help regenerate your skin cells while you sleep at night, and help you wake up to more radiant skin.
Schedule regular facials to help open and clear your pores of accumulated toxins. You can also schedule regular micro-dermabrasion treatments to help smooth off the rough outer layer of skin, and reveal the newer skin that is constantly regenerating.
Treat yourself to regular skin masks including clay masks that pull out dirt and toxins, or collagen masks that help firm up your skin. And add some hyaluronic acid gel or serum to help plump up the moisture level in your skin cells. Ask your dermatologist about medical grade products including glycolic acid, retinoids and any other products that are proven to help regenerate the collagen and elastin in your skin.
Microneedling Helps Build Collagen And Makes Your Skin Look Younger and Smoother
Look into microneedling or laser facials for a deeper, more intense treatment that provides longer lasting effecst on the epidermal layers of your skin.
Microneedling is the application of tiny needles that gently puncture the outer layer of your skin, which causes your deeper levels of collagen to come and repair it. This leads to a greater presence of collagen in your outer layer of skin, and makes it grow thicker and stay stronger for months to come. Doing this regularly can really help keep your skin looking young, and keep aging at bay. Your practitioner will numb your skin first, to ensure you don’t feel discomfort or pain while it the procedure is being done.
Laser Facials Help Increase Collagen and Cell Turnover, Reverse Skin Damage, and Help Your Skin Look Younger And More Radiant
There are a number of laser facial treatments that can be done for to achieve different goals with your skin care, and with different down times. A CO2 or fractional laser facial is similar to microneedling except that lasers damage staggered areas of your skin, which causes collagen to rush to renew it.
Deeper laser facials may result in a downtime that ranges from one to three to ten days, and yield remarkable results. And there are lighter laser facials that can be done for people of all ages (typically past your 20’s) that cause minor reddening of your skin, or have no down time at all. These are sometimes called lunchtime facials.
Yes, your skin will continually age, and the process can be explained in a scientific if not chemical way. Understanding the process is key because it will help you learn how you can stop, reverse or slow down skin aging. Thankfully, there are a number of extremely affordable tools in your arsenal to help you fight skin aging every day and every step of the way.
