Lifestyle Choices

Nothing betrays your age like the state of your skin. When you are young, it is thick, glowing, soft, and elastic. As the years go by, a number of changes take place. The thickness of the skin diminishes by half. It loses its firmness. First, expression lines and minor discolorations form, then these tiny imperfections gradually become wrinkles and blotched skin, which is no longer able to retain water as it once could–skin that has lost its elasticity and turned crepey and old-looking. How fast all this happens depends not only on your genetic inheritance but also on the internal state of your body, your stress levels, and the care and protection you provide for your skin from the outside.

The aging process in your skin is really no different from anywhere else in the body, except that it can be faster. This is because, first, the skin’s cells tend to divide more often than most other kinds of cells, so genetic mutations are passed on more rapidly, and second, because your skin has to put up with so many external insults from what it is exposed to environmentally. (more…)

BEGIN BY STAYING OUT OF THE SUN

To preserve your skin from premature aging, in addition to the constant use of a sunscreen on your face as part of your everyday skin care, you should understand the art of sunbathing—that is if you want to tan at all. Ideally, of course, you would be far better off pale.

As we’ve already said, the sun is your skin’s worst “ager.” It has been proved that exposure to ultraviolet light brings about permanent fundamental alterations in the genetic material of skin cells and encourages the process of cross-linking. These changes are cumulative and irreversible. Even when sun-exposed skin from an arm is grafted onto a protected area such as the abdomen and left there for years, it still remains older- looking and darker than the skin surrounding it. (more…)