Healthy skin care for beautiful skin is all about taking care of your skin from the inside. It's less about what skin care products you put on your skin and more about what you do to keep it healthy. Healthy skin will always be beautiful skin.
Ten per cent of skin ageing is intrinsic, being dependent on your genes. Look at your parents: how has their skin fared as they've got older? They are a good indicator of how you might expect your skin to age. Eventually everyone looks older, but some age sooner than others.
Other factors - extrinsic, or lifestyle, factors - such as smoking, stress, bad diet and the weather can literally leave their mark in the form of lines, sags and wrinkles. The good news, though, is that you can take charge and choose which ones are going to affect your skin's ageing by being careful about exposing yourself to the sun, never smoking, sleeping well, eating healthily and avoiding toxins and pollutants.
Skin Care Tips 1 - Protect Skin From The Sun
Up to 80 per cent of premature ageing is caused by overexposure to the sun's harmful ultraviolet rays: a completely preventable source of ageing. Sun damage causes collagen and elastin to degenerate, as a result of which the skin sags and takes on a leathery appearance and texture, age spots develop and coarse wrinkles and broken blood vessels appear on the skin's surface.
Sun damage over the years can develop into skin cancer, which may stay invisible for 20 years or more. For all these reasons it is vital that you protect your skin, especially the skin on your face, with a sunscreen containing a minimum sun protection factor of 15 (SPF15). (Note that, because of the way in which sunscreen works, it is never necessary to use a higher factor than SPF30, whatever the conditions.)
Skin Care Tips 2 - Stop Smoking
As well as polluting your body with thousands of toxins, smoking takes its toll on the skin. As a result, smokers age badly. Smoking promotes the formation of free radicals in the body, which affect skin renewal at a cellular level, as well as restricting the circulation to many areas of the body, thereby starving the skin of the vital oxygen and nutrients it needs for a healthy complexion.
Many smokers develop lines that run from their mouth to their nose and have hollow cheeks from the inhaling motion. If that's not enough to put you off smoking, the fact that it also discolors the skin, hair and nails might be.
Skin Care Tips 3 - Steer Clear Of Toxins
Toxins found in polluted air, drugs, pesticides, food and food additives, and chemicals are eliminated from the body by the liver, kidneys and lymph system. Good skin depends on healthy blood getting to the dermis and filtering the toxic waste away. An insufficient blood supply or blood high in toxins or accumulated waste under-nourishes and overloads our systems. The skin then becomes a dumping ground for excess unfiltered toxins, which produce free radicals. As a result of toxic overload, we often see deep furrows between the eyes and puffy under-eye bags. But the solution lies in your hands: steer clear of toxins in the first place, boost your circulation and detoxify your body.
Skin Care Tips 4 - Get A Good Night's Sleep
We need beauty sleep so that our faces and bodies can relax and de-stress. Go to bed with a clean face for eight hours' sleep to give your skin cells the chance to regenerate. A lack of refreshing sleep or any kind of sleep deprivation shows itself as saggy eyelids, bags under the eyes and dark under-eye circles, along with a pallid complexion. Keep your bedroom well ventilated and not too dry, otherwise your skin's moisture will evaporate during the night, giving you dry skin.
