Some people appear to be blessed with good skin that ages gracefully and does everything right as you get older. Then there are the rest of us who must deal with the wrinkles, fine lines and age spots of skin that isn’t aging quite as gracefully. Fortunately, the beauty industry is working overtime these days to provide us with some excellent products when it comes to anti-aging and anti-wrinkle skin care.
Anti-aging and Anti-wrinkle Care for Your Skin
There’s a bit of a difference between the anti-aging varieties of skincare and the types of products that specifically target wrinkles. Aging skincare is often preventative. The most effective types of anti aging products include heavy moisturizers, specialized cleaners, exfoliating items and natural products that help to boost collagen and other elements of the skin to help it appear younger.
Anti-wrinkle skin care items are more in tune with targeting the actual wrinkles on your face. While there is plenty of overlap – exfoliating items come to mind – anti-wrinkle care is a specialized product within the realm of the actual skincare lines, and definitely one with great potential for making you appear younger, fresher and more beautiful.
Understanding Your Wrinkles
Wrinkles are lines in the skin caused by a number of conditions. When you’re young, the skin is soft and smooth. Collagen production in your skin is at a peak level and the amount of healthy fat in your skin helps to smooth out the cells creating the baby face you loved to look at in your teens and twenties. As you entered your thirties, you probably noticed your first fine lines.
The lines in your skin are first caused by overuse and the fragile nature of your skin. The frown line between your eyebrows for example is caused by you furrowing your brow. If you do this often, the muscles develop a muscle memory and start to furrow when you’re not trying to look serious or scowl. The muscles get tight and hold their position while the skin, which might have once smoothed over the tighter muscles, falls into place on its own thanks to a lack of poufy collagen and the wrinkles are born.
The same is true of the fine lines around your eyes and perhaps around your mouth. As you continue to age, your skin thins out even more showing more wrinkles. There are plenty of contributing factors to these wrinkles including sun damage, lack of proper skin moisture and environmental contributors like free radicals. The drier and thinner your skin is, the more wrinkles you’re going to see every time you look in the mirror. To battle these wrinkles, you’re going to need products that counteract the natural thinning and drying of skin – you have to make your skin plump and smooth again, like it was when you were younger.
Anti-Wrinkle Products Can Help
There are many different anti-wrinkle products and many of them have the same premise, but work in very different ways. If you think that the main goal of the skincare products is to make skin appear young and fuller, many of the products make sense.
Lotions and Creams – Dry skin is the opposite of what you need if you’re looking to fight wrinkles. You can fight off the dry and worn out skin with heavy lotions and creams. Your daily routine at this age should include both a daytime moisturizer under your make up as well as a heavy night cream that you use while you’re sleeping. Of course, the lotions and creams aren’t just going to include moisture.
Moisturizers designed for anti aging and anti-wrinkle care are full of additional ingredients that help to perform other feats on your skin. For example, the daytime skin moisturizer you might wear contains sunscreen at the very least. This sunscreen is light enough to not feel greasy and it helps to protect the skin from the UVA and UVB rays that can break down the smooth cells of the skin more quickly. By wearing sunscreen in your moisturizer, you’ll be protecting your skin every moment of the day, even just walking across a parking lot or down a street.
Moisturizers contain other ingredients as well designed to do more intense forms of work when it comes to aging. Your moisturizer might contain special plant extracts and supplemental vitamins designed to help exfoliate your skin or to help boost it back up by increasing collagen production.
Exfoliation – One of the major ways we fight aging is through exfoliation. Your skin is constructed in layers that are constantly growing. As the bottom layers grow, they force the top layers of skin up and out until the very top layer of dead skin cells sits on top of the skin. These dead skin cells make your skin appear dry and lackluster. If you’re hoping to look young and fresh, often the first step is to remove these top few layers of dead skin or dying skin cells.
A gentle exfoliating agent can be found in many face washes and moisturizers; often in both once you reach a certain level of skincare. In the face wash you’ll find microbeads that help to scrub at skin while you wash your face in the morning or the evening. The beads simply rough up skin enough as you wash that the top layers flake off (you don’t get to see this it happens at such a fine level) and you’re left with a fresher, brighter face.
If you combine that washing exfoliation with your skin moisturizer you might notice that your moisturizer has natural extracts or other ingredients that continue to break down the top layers of skin. These very light acids eat away at the very top layers of skin to even out the complexion and make your skin even brighter. By using exfoliation products on a regular basis, even if they aren’t in your usual wash and lotion, you’re going to be giving your skin a more rapid means of producing new cells while also removing the top, foggy layer of skin that makes wrinkles more pronounced and helping to visually brighten and smooth skin.
Abrasion – a slightly tougher form of exfoliation, abrasion – microderm or otherwise – is a way of roughing off those top layers of skin and polishing the skin that is revealed. If you think of a buffer on a car and then scale it way, way down for a face, you have the exact concept of the abrasion. Just like a buffer takes off the waxy build-up on a car, a microderm abrasion skin care kit helps to buff off the top dully layers of skin. This reveals the newer skin underneath that is both smooth and brighter.
Since the new skin isn’t as dry, it doesn’t settle into the wrinkles and lines in the face with as many pronounced dips and creases, so the face is actually smoother. Wrinkles are made up of layers, just like the smooth skin on your face. When you buff off the top layers of skin, you’re buffing off the top of the wrinkles making them less defined and even helping them fade a bit, especially if the lotions or cream you use after the abrasion is one that helps to stimulate collagen production or plump up skin even more.
Chemical Peels – The top layer of skin removal when it comes to anti-aging and anti-wrinkle care for skin is the chemical peel. The peel works by using an acid to actually etch off layers of skin – the more pronounced the acid, the deeper the peel will be. A light peel might be done at home with a special skin care kit. A heavy peel will be done at a doctor’s office under anesthesia because the acid is strong enough to do real harm if used incorrectly and there is definitely discomfort associated with the procedure.
The end result of the peel is hard to argue with, however. When you use a peel, you’re removing the top layers of skin. With those layers, you’re also going to be removing many of your fine lines and taking off the top of your deeper wrinkles as well helping to smooth the face significantly. Another serious benefit of the peel is that when you remove more than just a few top layers of skin, you remove many of the skin imperfections including blemishes, scars and age spots as well. The skin revealed underneath is brighter, lighter and in many cases almost entirely free of the aging problems that plagued you previously.
Botox – The queen of the anti-aging and anti-wrinkle skincare is Botox. This series of small injections puts in a strong agent just under the skin, into the layer of muscles that tend to contract and gain muscle memory. When the Botox enters these muscles it causes this repeated muscle memory to stop and the muscle relaxes. This allows the furrow in your brow to literally fall away as the muscles cease to make the ridges and wrinkles. After a series of Botox injections, your face appears smooth and your brow in particular is much improved. Botox is always prescribed and then administered by a specialty doctor or in some cases a licensed skin care professional with medical supervision.
Beating Aging One Day at a Time
Unfortunately for us, there’s not a magic cure for aging and wrinkles. Once you start a skin care regime of anti aging and anti wrinkle skin care products, you can plan on their continued use if you hope to maintain the work you’ve done to date and improve your skin condition even more as it continues to age. Battling age is a lifelong battle that starts young and continues for years.
Remember that as you fight off wrinkles and age spots, that you’re always winning what amounts to a losing battle. You’ll never appear to be twenty when you’re actually fifty or sixty, but so long as you keep it all in perspective, you probably will come to the same realization that almost all women do.
You’re not trying to preserve your youth with anti-aging and anti-wrinkle skin care products. Instead, you’re trying to age as gracefully as you can to be sure you appear to be younger and lovelier than your age might indicate. You want to appear young for your age so you work hard to appear that way.
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