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Protecting your skin from the sun in your later years
Both male and females today continue to pursue ways to delay facial wrinkles and to give their complexions that looks healthy, vibrancy, and beautiful. In ancient times, youthful skin came about from herbal formulas.
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Then when we reached the synthetic age with its top advertising, nature got left behind.
Today, it’s the chemical laboratories and the cosmetic surgeons that are keeping the world ‘forever young’.
Who doesn’t want skin that looks 25 when you are 45, right?
But it’s a bit unfortunate that many of the marketable creams of today that promise glowing complexions contain antibiotics, hormones, and other irritants that do more harm than good.
They give adverse effects to the skin like drying, swelling, itchiness, and rashes.
Fortunately, there are a few skin experts who still look to nature for healthier ingredients that can hold back the clock, naturally.
Stay out the sun – it’s that simple
The sun is powerful and not friendly to people who want youthful skin because it can drain the skin of natural oils and moisture from the body, hastening the skin-aging process.
Overexposure to the sun’s rays explains the dry leathery faces of many farmers and those who perform outdoor jobs and others who bask on beaches, ‘soaking’ up the sun.
Between the hours of 11h00-15h00, the sun produces burning infrared rays which cause a breakdown in the body’s tissues. If your body is in a poisonous state, you can even be at risk of cancer.
Try and do outdoor activities before and after hottest sun hours. It is important to select a powerful sunscreen with powerful SPF to protect your skin against UV radiation.
It will need to be reapplied every 1-2 hours, especially if you sweat a lot in the sun or do a lot of swimming.
- Never go out into the sun for extended periods of time without a hat, even when wearing a sunscreen. It certainly helps to reduce the signs of aging. Avoid hats that have a wide weave or holes in them like the straw types because these let in the sunlight.
- If its wintertime, which can make skin dry and wrinkled, a light scarf worn across your face in winter also protects the skin.
- Don’t forget your shades, choosing ones that offer 100% UV protection for protection against very harmful sun rays. The wrap-around ones or oversized ones give that extra protection to protect the sensitive areas around the eyes. Get shades with polarized lenses because they reduce the glare, and therefore fatigue and eye-strain on the eyes which can be so aging.
- Exercise counts, big time because it increases circulation in your body which removes toxic waste from your system, increasing the nutrients and giving you a healthy glow.
- Facial yoga will do wonders for keeping your skin youthful. It is all about exercising the facial muscles to prevent wrinkles from starting to form. Do it like this:
- * Place both hands, facing inwards, on your forehead, spreading your fingers between your hairline and your eyebrows. Then gently ‘wipe’ or sweep your fingers outwards, at the same time applying a bit of light pressure. The experts say doing this 20 minutes a day 6 times a week will benefit the skin *
- You need to quit smoking, because being exposed to cigarette smoke speeds up the natural aging process big time, causing premature skin damage and aging.
- You can always try Botox and laser treatments because the Botox treatments relax the facial wrinkles, preventing them from getting deeper. There are less-invasive skin treatments like IPL-intense pulsed light treatment. People today also go for the infrared saunas, and because they provide so many health benefits for quite a few conditions, they are said to help with the appearance of the skin too.
Apart from the above, moisturize your skin daily, exfoliate it once a week, apply anti-aging creams, eat and drink plenty of water and skin-friendly foods that keep your skin hydrated and elastic, take a supplement packed with antioxidants, get plenty of good, natural sleep and change your lifestyle to create healthier skin.
Then you really can have age-defiant skin and life can really be a beach.
What can you do about it?!
You've probably seen this viral video in all the dark corners of the web this week, showing what the sun has done to the seemingly beautiful skin.
It's shocking, but let's add a little context to this random "scientific" video. Ultraviolet light damages all human skin, dark, fair, and all the colors in-between;
the reason we even HAVE skin color is an evolutionary response to sunlight damaging human skin.
First, what you're seeing in this video is the reflection of UV light. Ultraviolet light works the same as any other light.
It's either absorbed or reflected -- darker colors absorb more than lighter.
What the camera is showing us, is where the skin is absorbing or reflecting more UV light.
The dark spots are where the UV light isn't bouncing back at the camera. UV light is part of the light spectrum, and though it's just outside the visible spectrum for humans, if aliens were to show up tomorrow, they might see us the way this camera does! Some of those freckles, blemishes, and spots revealed by the camera are pockets there because the skin is under attack.
When UV light hits the skin it can be reflected by our outermost layer of skin, the stratum corneum.
It that doesn't catch the radiation, the rays hit the inner layer of skin, the epidermis where it encounters that melanin packaged within melanosomes.
When skin is exposed to the ultraviolet rays in sunlight, it darkens, or tans.
All skin regardless of color, tans. More melanin scatters more of the damaging UV rays. Melanin in the skin is produced by melanocytes located in the epidermis.
And it comes in the form of two pigments the brown eumelanin and a yellow and red phaeomelanin! Dark-skinned humans produce melanin all the time, while lighter-skinned people produce it as needed.
The melanin is evolution's way of scattering the rays of UV light before they can harm your DNA since we no longer have dark body hair to protect us. If our skin didn't do this, the UV radiation would get through, corrupt our DNA, and cause cancer before we could reach breeding age. There were probably human ancestors that didn't tan -- and thus they weren't able to pass on their genes as efficiently.
Sunburns are radiation burns from overexposure to ultraviolet radiation. It turns red because your body is trying to heal the damage and sending blood to the area. The burn isn't going to protect you from anything, neither will a tan, really. In the end, ALL sun exposure results in UV light impacting your skin. It is never-ending. If it's cloudy, there's UV. When it's snowy the UV can reflect off the snow and cause even MORE problems. When you're in a pool or ocean? Yep. UV.
Light-skinned people are most susceptible to skin cancers because they have to make up for not having the melanin in the first place. Darker skinned people scatter more of the UV rays naturally, and therefore have significantly lower incidences of skin cancer, according to the CDC. Obviously, you can use sunscreen, which contains organic and inorganic chemicals to block the UV rays that cause cancers.
Some of the molecules absorb the rays and release the energy as heat. However, a new study from the American Chemical Society found an overabundance of sunscreen in the oceans frequented by beachgoers.
The titanium dioxide and zinc oxide nanoparticles in the creams and lotions were reacting with UV rays and creating hydrogen peroxide toxins that kill algae and phytoplankton -- the lifebloods of ocean ecosystems.
It's a lose-lose.
Though it's better to wear it to protect yourself. Maybe we should just go to a movie.
Youtube
How the sun see you video link
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