Taking Care of Your Skin
Follow our recommendations for maintaining a healthy, younger looking skin. Start with a healthy life style, a nutritious diet, the right amount of sleep, and maintain manageable stress levels.
Avoid UV-light
The number one enemy of your skin is the harmful UV radiation from the sun and tanning beds.
UV-light is a significant contributor to skin damage and premature skin aging. Hats, sun-blocks, and other preventive measures will reduce skin damage and help you keep looking young.
Take these steps to deal with UV:
- Plan outdoor activities early or late in the day to avoid the peak sunlight hours between 10 am and 4 pm. (12 noon is the most intense time of the day)
- Avoid tanning beds
- Wear a broad-brimmed hat and sunglasses
- Sit in the shade whenever possible
- Wear protective, tightly-woven clothing
- Use a broad-spectrum sunscreen with a SPF of at least 15 on all exposed skin, including the lips, even on cloudy days
- Use a water-resistant sunscreen if exposed to water, either through swimming or sweating
- Apply sunscreen 20-30 min prior to exposure and reapply frequently
- Chose a comprehensive UVA+UVB blocking sunscreen with well-matched UV blocking agents and low risk of adverse reactions. If you have sun-sensitive skin, use SPF 30 or higher for UVB and similarly strong UVA protection
- Use extra caution near water, snow and sand as they reflect the damaging rays of the sun
- Enhance your levels of vitamin D through supplements and a healthy diet
- Your sunglasses will need to protect from both UVA and UVB light and ideally, cover as much of your face as possible
Do Not Smoke
Smoking damages your skin almost as much as sunlight by generating a flood of free radicals in your blood stream. If you can not stop smoking, then take antioxidants; these may provide partial protection from smoking-relate skin damage.
Sleep on your back.
For most of the day, gravity pulls your skin down. This contributes to facial sag and wrinkles. You can give your skin an extra rest as you sleep by sleeping on your back. When you sleep on your back, the stretching effect of gravity on your skin is minimal.
Don't Drink Alcohol in the Evening
Alcohol opens up the capillaries (small blood vessels) of your skin, so more water moves from your bloodstream into soft tissues. When you combine this with the horizontal position of your body during sleep; it results in facial puffiness. This will increase your skin’s stretching and cause faster wrinkle formation. So drink in moderation and at least three hours before going to bed.
Don't wash your skin too often or to aggressively
Washing strips skin of oil and moisture. If you use harsh detergents (such as sodium lauryl sulfate or similar compounds that are common in shampoos, liquid soaps and shower gels) the stripping gets worse.
Reduce Your Chlorine Exposure
Tap water contains chlorine which causes oxidative damage. Washing your face once or twice a day is sufficient. Excessively long or frequent washing, baths, or showers overexpose your skin to this chlorine. In addition, as the rate of chemical reactions increases with temperature; hotter tap water is even worse for your skin.
Avoid Skin Irritants
Skin irritants may directly damage skin matrix and cells. Then these irritants may trigger an inflammatory or allergic reaction in the skin, which in turn, can cause added skin damage by releasing destructive free radicals.
Everyone should try to avoid skin irritants. However, people with sensitive skin should be particularly careful.
Manage Inflammation
Inflammation is a reaction of the body in response to various types of damage including infection, trauma, abrasions, burns and so forth. Inflammation is an important and necessary part of the healing process. However, prolonged or excessive inflammation is damaging to the skin or any other organ where it occurs.
In particular, inflammation causes a release of large amounts of damaging free radicals and MMP, which, among other things, accelerates the aging process. While occasional short-term and self-limiting inflammation from cuts, abrasions or cosmetic procedures should not be a major concern, chronic inflammation has to be dealt with.
Manage Puffiness
Puffiness in the eye area is a common manifestation of mild facial edema. Edema is a term for the excess fluid accumulation in soft tissue manifested by swelling. Edema stretches the skin and eventually leads to wrinkles and sagging. The eye area is particularly prone to edema due to the dense capillary network and lack of fat padding. It is important to know that significant edema (especially if not confined to face) may be a sign of a health problem, such as an allergy, kidney insufficiency or liver disease. It has to be investigated by a physician to rule out medical conditions.
A more common situation, however, is morning puffiness (mild facial edema that occasionally occurs in the morning and goes away during the day) caused by lifestyle factors (such as lack of sleep, alcohol consumption and others) rather than a health condition. It is important to minimize morning puffiness not so much because it is a transient nuisance on awakening but because it is one of the biggest contributors to the aging of the eye area.
Relax Your Face
Certain facial expressions, if repeated often enough, cause the so-called motion wrinkles. In particular, squinting creates motion wrinkles known as crow's feet while frowning causes forehead wrinkles known as frown lines.
Many people squint or frown without knowing it. Ask people who see you every day whether you tend to squint or frown. The first step towards reducing squinting and frowning is being aware of it. The next step is to develop a habit to relax your face, especially when you feel that you are beginning to squint or frown.
Squinting is common among people who are nearsighted and either do not wear glasses or have insufficiently strong ones. If you don't see clearly in the distance when your eyes are relaxed, chances are you tend to squint. Adjust your eyewear to ensure clear vision.
Limit Your Use of Makeup
Makeup products often contain potential skin irritants. For the sake of long-term skin health, it is best to use makeup in moderation, particularly in the eye area. Long-lasting makeup may be particularly harmful because it tends to contain harsher chemicals and also requires highly irritating solvents for its removal.
Do Not Overuse Skin Care Products
Indiscriminate use of multiple skin care products may have significant drawbacks. First, some products are simply ineffective: not only are they a waste of money but they may also prevent optimal absorption of the effective products. Second, some products can contain ingredients with potential for low-level long-term skin damage.
Finally, many products with scientifically proven skin benefits, such as retinoids, vitamin C or alpha-hydroxy acids, may cause skin irritation or damage if misused or overused. Be very selective regarding what products you use and how you use them. Any extra time spent on research would not only save you money, but may help avoid unnecessary skin damage.
Avoid Excessive Cleansing & Exfoliation
Some skincare activities may do more harm then good when misused or overused. In particular, excessive cleansing strips the skin of protective sebum and may lead to dryness, skin sensitivity and other problems. Avoid cleansing with harsh detergents and alcohol-based solutions. (Alcohol-based cleansers may be useful for people with very oily skin, but are too drying for everyone else.) Avoid washing your skin with hot water. Avoid cleansing or washing your skin more than two times a day.
Another overused practice is exfoliation. Occasional exfoliation may be useful: it refreshes the skin surface, increases circulation and brightens the appearance. However, exfoliation is a potentially damaging procedure: you use controlled destruction to strip off the top layer of skin cells. Ideally you remove only the dead cells on the surface of the skin. However, if you exfoliate too frequently or too aggressively, then you also remove or cause damage to living cells. Eventually that may produce long-term skin damage and exhaust the skin's long-term capacity to regenerate.
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We can discuss your concerns and goals while you learn about or treatments and programs.
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