Sunscreen To Reduce Wrinkles? Will wearing sunscreen help slow the appearance of wrinkles? This movie star spent a great deal of his youth not being aware of sun damage dangers.
Sunscreen? Really, can sunscreen reduce my wrinkles? I have long ignored information that was right there. Waiting to help me along my life’s path. However, I ignored most of it. Did you?
Our wrinkles according to Skin Cancer.com. are lines, creases, and furrows in our skin.
Wrinkles develop in the normal part of our aging process. Your skin becomes thinner, dryer, and slower to renew and repair itself as you get older. Then to make matters worse, your skin is drawn downward by the pull of gravity.
For women, hormonal changes associated with menopause further contribute to the development of your wrinkles.
The number and severity of your wrinkles can be affected by your lifestyle factors. This is including sun exposure, smoking, and even repeated facial movements. All these different factors make the wrinkles especially prominent on your face, especially around your eyes and mouth.
Most Common Causes Of Wrinkles
Over the course of your lifetime, your skin will receive exposure to the everyday facts of aging. You have been deciding about sun exposure with the life you have chosen. Have you chosen to pursue fun hobbies like golfing or bike riding? Or do you love tennis? Do you garden?
When we are very young, we forget to use sunscreen, much less reapply. How old were you when you realized that you would need to reapply your sunscreen every 2 hours? I’m not admitting how old I was, but I no longer qualified as a teenager!
Smoking, repetitive movements of your facial muscles. Then we have the free radical damage. Age and sun-related loss of elastin and collagen.
All of these will contribute to the development of wrinkles.
How Aging Relates To Wrinkles In Your Skin
With age, your skin undergoes multiple changes that contribute to the development of wrinkles. There are multitudes of reasons why we get wrinkles.
- Your skin cells divide more slowly and your skin’s middle layer, your dermis, starts getting thinner.
- Then in your mid-20s or so, collagen and elastin, the protein fibers in the dermal layer that give skin its elasticity and shape? These important proteins start to loosen and unravel, allowing wrinkles on your skin’s surface.
- As all this other stuff is happening, the fat diminishes in the subcutaneous tissue that makes up the deeper layers of your skin!
- Your skin is not able to absorb and maintain moisture and the sebaceous glands produce less sebum (oil). This, of course, causes your skin to be dryer. The loss of oil then speeds up the appearance of wrinkles!
- With everything shifting and changing, you end up with constricted blood vessels. These changed blood vessels slow down the flow of blood and oxygen to your skin cells. This slowdown interferes with the skin’s normal repair process.
- The pull of gravity over time loosens the skin, causing it to sag and emphasizing the appearance of lines and wrinkles.
- In women, the decline in estrogen that occurs with menopause is accompanied by a decline in collagen as high as 30%.
Do You Have Repetitive Facial Movements?
Frowning, squinting, and smiling are all considered repetitive facial movements. This causes tiny facial muscles to contract.
After a while, these muscles don’t relax. They stay contracted. This, added to the pull of gravity? This will help form a wrinkle.
These vary from tiny lines that extend vertically from the upper lip,(smoker’s lines) to those deep crevasses between your eyes. (frown lines)
Your nose even gets on board causing wrinkles with the nasolabial folds. These wrinkles extend from the side of the nose to the corner of the mouth (laugh lines).
What Are Your Lifestyle Risk Factors?
We do have age-related skin changes that cause wrinkles. They are inevitable.
Certain other contributing factors are not, and we can do something about them. Once we become aware of the issues, we are then alerted to what we can do. Until then, most of us just go on continuing the activities that cause Wrinkles!
There is enough of your skin wrinkling program embedded in your skin’s DNA that sometimes it may seem hopeless to make a difference. However, as with most things in our life, preventing is a better choice than any treatment after the fact. This is true with wrinkles as well.
Choosing to be sun smart is one area that can really make a difference. Wearing UPF clothing is a big step in protecting your skin. Your sun hat, your sunglasses, and your long sleeve loose fitting sun blocking shirt are important.
Sunscreen is important to protect you, but added to a good sun blocking program with sunblock and sun blocking clothing will allow safe fun in the sun-times.
Let’s Think About Sun Exposure
The sun’s ultraviolet (UV) rays, both UVA and UVB rays, are the culprits for 90% of premature skin aging. Another term for premature skin aging is photoaging.
The severity of your skin damage that is caused by the sun is determined by total lifetime exposure to UV rays. Then consider as well skin color (pigment): The darker a person’s skin the more natural protection they have from the effects of radiation.
Just because you have darker tone skin, you can’t get careless about your skincare. Yes, you can be exposed a bit longer before the damage starts. But, that damage will start. Don’t get careless and think you can avoid any sun protection for a long day in the sun.
Expose your skin to the sun? You will see how it affects the layers of your skin in different ways.
The sun will damage collagen fibers in the dermis and elastin fibers to begin to accumulate at abnormal levels. This accumulation causes enzymes called metalloproteinases to be produced in large quantities. These metalloproteinases should repair all the damaged tissue.
Typically, metalloproteinases repair skin by producing collagen, but sun damage causes them to malfunction. Their DNA has been damaged. These malfunctioning metalloproteinases will actually break down collagen, leading to the formation of fibers called “solar scars.”
As the skin repeats this imperfect rebuilding process over and over again, wrinkles develop.
Just A Bit About Free Radicals
Free radicals are unstable oxygen molecules that can alter the genetics (DNA) of a cell and cause wrinkles and skin damage by activating the metalloproteinases that break down collagen.
This causes you to be sensitive to the smallest amounts of Sunrays on your skin
Once these free radicals are active, smoking or exposure to air pollution can worsen this damage. Anytime you are sensitive to a condition, it is harder to control and clear up.
I think we often ignore some of the signs our skin is trying to show us to remind us to use common sense and get out of the sun. Or when our body is trying to tell us to eat a healthier diet or to get rest. We cause problems for ourselves by ignoring these signals.
Smoking? You Know You Should Stop
Smokers tend to have premature wrinkles. A smoker’s skin often appears dramatically older than that of people of the same age who does not smoke.
The toxic chemicals in tobacco damage skin in a variety of ways, affecting elasticity, texture, color, and chemical makeup. One of these is by producing excess metalloproteinase. Remember. smoking causes free radicals. Free radicals affect how the metalloproteinase functions.
In addition, the nicotine in cigarettes causes the narrowing of your blood vessels in the outermost layers of the skin. Thus limiting the amount of blood, oxygen, and nutrients, such as vitamin A, that reach and nourish your skin. The skin cells of smokers are slower to regrow as well.
Just A Summary
Fine lines to deep furrows. Yes, skin wrinkles are an inevitable part of aging.
Some people embrace, or at least accept, crow’s feet, smile lines, and so forth as emblems of a life well-lived.
Others don’t.
If you fall in the latter camp, you’re probably aware of the many anti-aging skin products designed to reduce the appearance of wrinkles. You would get better results dealing with these and other signs of aging, by taking steps to prevent wrinkles while you’re young.
Most of the changes in the skin that cause wrinkles can’t be avoided.
Your lifestyle practices like unprotected sun exposure, smoking and eating a diet low in nutrients. All are bad for you in the long run.
A bad diet and not staying hydrated will contribute to the early onset of wrinkles. The healthier your lifestyle is overall, the happier you’ll be delaying wrinkles and other signs of aging.
Sami’s Take On Sunscreen To Reduce Wrinkles
We know that the sun will turn dangerous in the blink of an eye. Protecting our skin is important and often late when brought to our attention.
Becoming aware of how we can protect our skin by sun blocking clothing as well as sunscreen will enable us to delay the signs of aging.
Like the images of Robert Redford, there is little we can do to stop getting older. Yes, we can die young, but why would we? Getting older is a natural part of the life cycle. Knowing some ways to help ourselves slow the wrinkling process of our skin can help slow how old we look.
Helping your friends and family understand the benefit of a little precaution. You can grow older and develop wrinkles slowly.
Will you make some changes? I certainly wish I had.