As we go through life, our skin undergoes a lot of wear and tear. Pollutants in the air, the harsh rays of the sun, secondhand smoke seeping into our pores, even over-washing your face can strip it of the natural oils it craves. This damage can lead to wrinkles, sagging skin, and dark circles or bags beneath our eyes.
What if there was a way to undo that damage, to turn back the metaphorical clock and look younger at 40, 50, or at any age? Even better – what if you could learn how to make skin look younger naturally?
There are all sorts of ways to look younger if you’re willing to go a surgical or otherwise invasive route – botox, chemical peels, face lifts…it seems there’s no end to the list of possible procedures! However, surgery and invasive routes can be a frightening and intrusive experience, and there’s always room for error.
For those of us who are more interested in doing things the natural way, fear not – there are ways to look years younger without surgery! A reliable daily skincare regime, weekly exercise, and the added use of vitamins can do wonders for making your skin look younger. By making these minor adjustments to your day to day life, you can take proactive steps towards keeping your skin healthy, and look ten years younger.
Look Younger Naturally
The best ways to look younger is to do so naturally. Let’s look at a number of things you can do to retain (or regain) your youthful looks in a manner that your skin and body will both love.
Stay Hydrated
One of the simplest changes you can make to help your skin and make your face look younger is ensuring that you’re hydrating enough throughout the day. This extends beyond just drinking water.
According to the University of Madison-Wisconsin School of Medicine, “the unfortunate truth about drinking water and skin is that water will reach all the other organs before it reaches the skin. So, it’s important to apply water to our skin and keep it there – this will not only show a visible difference in hydration, but it can prevent wrinkles, as well”.
The best ways to keep hydrated, in addition to drinking the recommended eight glasses of water a day, is to use a moisturizer that will replenish and protect your skin.
Keep Moving & Exercising
Another change you can make to your daily routine is making sure you’re exercising.
In one particular study, Dr. Mark Tarnopolsky took a group of relatively inactive volunteers, aged sixty-five and up with skin considered “normal” for their age, and put them in a three month program where they worked out twice a week. When the program ended, the volunteers had their skin biopsied, and the results spoke for themselves: “under a microscope, the volunteers’ skin ‘looked like that of a much younger person, and all they had done differently was exercise’”.
Working out boosts collagen production, and a raised heart rate and blood flow help to deliver vital nutrients to your skin. Just make sure you’re applying sunscreen before you head out the door to get that exercise – sun damage can lead to wrinkles and sagging, adding years to your appearance.
Eyes: The Window to the Soul
We’re all familiar with that old adage about our eyes being the windows to our souls, but sometimes our eyes have been known to reveal more than that! The skin around our eyes is often the first to reveal that damage. It’s also common to get bags under our eyes as we age, as the skin around them weakens and sags.
The best thing you can do for your eyes is to give them plenty of rest. Sleep is usually the first thing to get sacrificed when faced with a busy schedule, but getting eight hours every night goes a long way in reducing the bags around our eyes. Unfortunately, eight hours of sleep isn’t always possible – so what else can we do to make our eyes look younger naturally?
The skin around our eyes is more delicate than that on the rest of our face, so a specific eye cream, rather than the exclusive use of moisturizer, is an important addition to a natural beauty and skincare routine. Gently massaging beneath your eyes can help with blood flow and reduce the appearance of bags or dark circles, as well.
Beyond that, it’s important to make sure you’re getting your recommended amount of vitamins, many of which contain antioxidants that are imperative to the health of your skin.
Essential Vitamins
It’s important to make sure you’re giving your skin the nutrients it craves. Vitamins are a vital part of skin health. You can even take certain vitamins to look younger.
Vitamin E, for example, helps to retain moisture, which your skin has trouble doing on it’s own as you get older. It can be found in topical creams or lotions, or in supplements. It can also be found in nuts, leafy vegetables like broccoli and spinach, and sunflower seeds (source).
Vitamin C boosts collagen production, and helps to improve firmness in skin – it’s also able to heal wounds and form scar tissue, as well. Vitamin C can be found in all fruits and vegetables, as well as in supplements. Vitamins E and C are best paired together – Dermatologist Karen E. Burke states that the use of these two vitamins together has “been noted to reduce photodamage, wrinkles, and improve skin texture”.
Another vitamin, Niacin (another name for B3), speeds up the turnover of your cells, leaving you with younger looking skin. According to the National Library of Medicine, a study of women aged fifty using a topical form of the B3 vitamin “revealed a variety of significant skin appearance improvement […]: reductions in fine lines and wrinkles, hyperpigmented spots, red blotchiness, and skin sallowness (yellowing). In addition, elasticity […] was improved”. In addition to supplements, niacin can be found in meats, milk, eggs, legumes, and rice.
Ensuring that you’re receiving the recommended daily dose of these essential vitamins can do wonders for your skin and keep you looking ten years younger at 40, 50, 60 or even 70, when your face is showing signs of aging.
Getting Older, Looking Younger
In order to keep our skin looking healthy and young, it’s important to adhere to a skincare routine. As we get older, our skin needs more help than it used to, so we have to turn to additional products.
Using items like moisturizers and eye creams that are enriched with vitamins can keep your skin youthful. Products like cleansers and toners purify and exfoliate, which boosts cell turnover and reveals more vibrant skin.
With the help of these products, we’re able to restore elasticity to the face, improve collagen production, reduce wrinkles, and soften the appearance of circles underneath our eyes, giving us ways to look younger even as we’re getting older.
Getting older is a natural part of life, and one that we should embrace. Lots of wonderful things come with age – wisdom, experience, maturity. Something that shouldn’t have to come with age is damaged, weathered skin.
By finding a reliable skincare routine that works for you, and ensuring you’re hydrating, exercising, and getting the vitamins your body needs, we’re able to undo years of damage and look years younger without surgery.
Our Recommendation for Younger Skin!
We recommend the Shaklee YOUTH® skin care line as it is clinically proven to give you younger-looking skin. In fact, in Shaklee’s clinical trials, 100% of women had younger-looking skin and 2/3 shifted their skin age into a younger decade.”
