Ageless Beauty: A Dermatologist's Secrets for Looking Younger Without Surgery

INTRODUCTION In one sense your skin is no different from any other organ in your body. Yet no other part of you performs such vital bodily functions while also serving as a barrier against the outside world. The natural cycle of skin renewal seems simple: old skin cells are continually shed and replaced with new ones that float up from below the surface to take their place. These new cells actually produce skin as soft as a newborn baby's, skin that would remain that way were it not for external factors and environmental effects such as the sun and the wind. Just nature alone can damage the newborn cells, causing them to grow irregularly. Even losing weight so that the stretched skin is no longer filled out has its effect. Nutritional factors, too, affect the growing cycle of the skin cell and, as we shall see in Chapter 12, can either help or hurt it. Add near-constant bombardment by ultraviolet light and other toxins to the equation and it becomes difficult for the skin to repair itself. I'll save my ozone-layer diatribe for another day, but before reading any further, you must understand that intrinsic aging factors like sun and the pull of gravity are only part of what causes your skin to change. The other part involves the myriad uncontrollable genetic abnormalities that prematurely age the skin--the impaired blood-vessel function of diabetes, for example, or autoimmune-related skin disorders. But take heart. It's all "fixable" to a large degree. And soon we shall see how. The wear and tear that skin endures affects different skin types differently, and although heredity still has a lot to do with it, aging signs vary significantly depending on your lifestyle. Even fair-skinned, natural blondes--the most susceptible to sun damage or "photoaging"--can, through prevention and self-care, defy the years. But I'm getting ahead of myself. First I want to draw the broad outlines of normal aging, so that you can know what to expect and what you can reverse. Believe it or not, the effects of aging on the skin begin to show as early as our late twenties, when we notice just the slightest appearance of fine lines and wrinkles, especially around the eyes and above the upper lip--the consequence of a gradual, but steady, loss of moisture and elasticity. A few years further down the road, we observe those nasolabial (or, more euphemistically, "smile") lines, slight furrows in the forehead and folds between the eyes, an unmistakable loosening of the jowls and neck, and excess skin above the eyes. The reality is that, like clockwork, each decade will leave its own marks and deepen the effects of those before it. How deeply is determined by two variables: heredity and lifestyle. Heredity includes the variables of genes, skin color, bone structure, hormonal output. Lifestyle includes time spent in the sun (yes, your teen years count), smoking, exercise (which improves your vascularity and your skin's texture), skin color (the more pigment your skin houses, the more protected you are), and yo-yo dieting, in which your skin tends to stretch and relax, stretch and relax. More bad news: With age our complexions get duller, brown spots begin to appear, and fatty pockets develop above and under the eyes and under the chin; our skin sweats less and produces less oil, steadily drying out and losing its luster. Postadolescent acne and other blemish disorders may also rear their ugly heads, fueled in part by hormone imbalances, which greet us later in life. A glance in a full-length mirror confirms that aging is not confined to the face. Spotted, thin-skinned hands are a dead giveaway, as are spider veins on the legs, thinning hair on our heads, and keratoses, which are rough growths on the skin, popping up like dandelions just about everywhere. These changes make us look older than we feel or feel older than we are--paradoxical conditions that I have always found immenseSteven Victor is the author of 'Ageless Beauty: A Dermatologist's Secrets for Looking Younger Without Surgery', published 2003 under ISBN 9780812932195 and ISBN 0812932196.