Beneficial Ingredients for Skin Care

What to look for in skin care.

I get tired of all the negative press skin care products get and hearing about what should not be in there. Lets look at the beneficial ingredients of skin care and what you should be looking for on your label. Here are a few. 

Natural Vegetable oils. I think it’s better to have natural vegetable oils in a skin care product because they offer the skin a variety of necessary fatty acids that the skin needs to maintain its barrier function. Good vegetable oils include olive oil, meadowfoam oil, rice bran oil, avocado oil and more.

Water. Water is an important part of a moisturizer because only water can moisturize. An all oil product helps hold in water and softens the skin but it of course cannot add water or moisture to the skin.

Preservative. Preservative free is a big trend now but just like food, anything you keep for more than a day or so requires preserving.  You can make a nice bowl of soup using fresh ingredients from your garden and it tastes great when you make it. But you would never leave it on your dresser and take a bite each night for the next few months. A non-preserved skin care product that you might make at home such as a mask is great to use immediately, but it needs to be preserved if you are not planning to use it up within a few days. It is just not safe to use an unpreserved product and you are putting yourself at risk for an infection.

Something extra.  There are many extras for skin care products from humectants to herb extracts and higher end ingredients such as peptides. Depending on what you want from your product you might want to look for these.

Humectants. Does your product contain a humectant? Something that binds water? This could be glycerin, hyaluronic acid, honey or caprylyl glycol. 

Vitamins. Vitamins are popular in cosmetics and might include vitamin E, vitamin B, vitamin C and vitamin A. Vitamin C is unstable and so is often found as vitamin C ester. Vitamin A is often masked in another oil that is high in vitamin A such as parsley, pumpkin or calendula flower extracts. These vegetable sources of vitamin A are actually a provitamin A called carotenoids. Vitamin B has several family members seen in skin care products including Vitamin B3 (niacin) often seen as niacinamide and Vitamin B5 or pantothenic acid. Vitamin B deficiency can result in redness, irritation, dermatitis and hyperpigmentation.

Peptides. Peptides are made in a lab but made by green chemistry meaning they it does not use or produce hazardous substances. 

Read your labels and look for something extra in your skin care. Natural skin care products can and should contain actives. And if you can't pronounce it, just ask - its not an indicator of toxicity.

What are Wrinkles

Changes in the texture of the skin that appear as lines, creases or folds are called wrinkles. They are normal changes in the skin that occurs with aging. Medically, wrinkles are known as rhytides.

The two layers of skin include the outer epidermis which lies on top of the second layer called the dermis. With time there is a decrease of large structural molecules including collagen, elastin and glycosaminoglycans in the dermis. This leads to decreases in elasticity, firmness and structure of the skin resulting in wrinkles.
The cells of the outer layer or epidermis slow their rate of cellular reproduction causing the epidermis to become thinner with age.

With time the epidermis and dermis tend to separate some. This separation leads to decreased blood supply and nutrients to the cells of the epidermis.

Wrinkles begin as fine lines and deepen with time. They occur mostly on the face, neck, backs of the hands and the forearms. They are not physically harmful, but can of course influence a person’s self-perception, and lead to a lack of confidence.

Expression lines that occur on the forehead, eyes and the corners of the mouth from talking, laughing and frowning can begin as early as in a one’s twenties. These lines eventually deepen into wrinkles and folds that affect deeper layers of the skin. Wrinkling of the skin caused by sun exposure can show up in the thirties. In the forties as dry skin becomes a problem, lines begin to deepen and progress through the fifties and sixties.

This process of aging skin is accelerated by exposure to excess sunlight, environmental pollutants and cigarette smoke. Internal factors associated with aging skin include decreases in estrogen levels that occur with menopause and decreased in metabolic activity of the skin cells. Fair skinned people are also more prone to wrinkles. There is no real evidence that stress promotes wrinkle formation, but many of us feel we have ‘earned’ our wrinkles through life’s challenges.

Protecting the barrier function of the skin is an important way to decrease the formation of wrinkles. Use of a good moisturizer to help maintain water in the skin and prevent water loss can delay and diminish lines. Look for a moisturizer that contains water and high quality oils to help prevent loss of moisture from the skin. Humectants such as glycerin, hyaluronic acid, hydrolyzed proteins, even hydrolyzed oat products can help.

There is of course extensive research done each year to investigate possible ingredients for skin creams that can help in the treatment and prevention of wrinkles. Although many ingredients end up being marketing hype, there are a few ingredients that have potential to help decrease the appearance of wrinkles. The trouble is that some of the anti-aging creams are able to garner large price tags and it has
to be questioned whether it is worth the price without solid data to back up the claims.

Nutrients such as antioxidants help combat environmental damage and are important in diminishing wrinkles as well. Antioxidants include vitamin C, vitamin E, alpha lipoic acid, carotenoids and green tea. Most importantly using these nutrients topically can only go so far, what we eat is also very important so remember to eat fruits and vegetables that are high in these nutrients.