What is Ageing Skin?

What is Ageing Skin?

A new era of skin care is upon us and it’s one to celebrate. Move over anti-ageing, instead it’s time to focus on keeping your skin healthy and radiant at all ages. Forget trying to turn back the clock, instead turn your attention towards finding the right skin care routine for you. With the right ingredients and products, you can help manage the visible signs of ageing and let your glow shine through. 

What Causes Ageing?

Before you build a routine for ageing skin, it’s important to understand how the body ages and what causes the visible signs of ageing. Believe it or not, it’s not quite as simple as you may think!

Intrinsic vs Extrinsic

Time stops for no one and as such our bodies naturally start to age as we get older. This process is known as intrinsic ageing. This is a continual process where cellular and biological functions begin to slow. We start to see visible signs of ageing through fine lines and wrinkles as the body’s levels of hyaluronic acid, collagen and elastin start to deplete with time. The good news? Only 10% of the skin’s ageing is due to intrinsic ageing. The remaining 90% is due to external factors, also known as extrinsic ageing. 

Extrinsic ageing is a process caused by exposure to environmental stressors. This includes lifestyle stressors (hello free radicals) like smoking, poor diet, and lack of exercise alongside external factors like pollution, UV rays and blue light radiation. This is where we can take precautions to protect our skin from undue effects by wearing sunscreen and staying out of the sun’s rays for extended periods of time, making healthy diet choices, and nourishing our skin with antioxidants.

Left unchecked, these highly volatile molecules cause oxidative damage to the skin and leads to inflammaging. What is inflammaging, you ask? Believe it or not, repeated exposure to free radicals is not good for the skin! This is where inflammaging occurs – a type of ageing that is induced by persistent inflammation that exhausts the poor skin’s defence mechanisms. Skin structure is weakened, collagen and elastin are degraded, and the skin’s barrier function is impaired. 

Treating Ageing Skin

After all that free radical fear mongering it’s time to tell you that there are steps you can take to protect yourself! Ever wonder why we keep going on about antioxidants? That’s because they are your best defence against free radicals. Antioxidants neutralise and remove free radicals as well as minimise the visible impact of environmental stress. Look for products that contain ingredients jam-packed with antioxidants like Vitamin C, especially those containing L-ascorbic acid to use as your daily protection.

Professional Treatments

Of course, the best thing you can do for your skin is to pop down to your local spa or salon and have a chat about treatments targeting ageing.
Professional peels are a great way to deeply exfoliate and reveal new, youthful skin. We recommend starting with a milder peel such as the Mangosteen Lactic 10% and building up to Yam & Pumpkin 20% for a more intense peel. Having a chat with a trained beauty therapist is the best way to assess what your skin needs and the best treatment option for you. To find your closest Eminence spa, click here.

Home Care Routine

These hero products pack quite the punch to target visible signs of ageing: 

What’s your favourite product to treat ageing skin? Connect with us on social media to share your experience!

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