From Elev8.com:
Your busy lifestyle leaves little time for pampering skin care. The result: Your skin isn’t the baby-soft body glove you were born with. As you age, your skin gradually becomes thinner and finely wrinkled. Oil-producing (sebaceous) glands grow less active, leaving your skin drier. The number of blood vessels in your skin decreases, your skin becomes more fragile, and you lose your youthful color and glow.
Good skin care – such as avoiding the sun, washing your skin gently and applying moisturizer regularly – can help delay the natural aging process and prevent many skin problems. These simple skin-care habits will help you protect your skin to keep it healthy and glowing for years to come.
1. Protect yourself from the sun.
The most important way to take care of your skin is to protect it from the sun. Ultraviolet light – the invisible but intense rays from the sun – damages your skin, causing deep wrinkles, dry, rough skin, liver spots, and more serious disorders, such as noncancerous (benign) and cancerous (malignant) skin tumors.
2. Don’t smoke.
Smoking accelerates aging of your skin and increases wrinkles. Skin changes from smoking can appear in young adults after 10 years of smoking.
Smoking causes narrowing of the tiny blood vessels in the outermost layers of skin. This decreases blood flow, depleting the skin of oxygen and nutrients, such as vitamin A, that are important to skin health. All of these factors increase damage to the elastic fibers (elastin) and collagen, which give your skin strength and elasticity.
In addition, the repetitive facial expressions you make when smoking – such as pursing your lips when inhaling and squinting your eyes to keep out smoke – may contribute to wrinkles. It’s also possible that repeated exposure to the heat from burning cigarettes may damage your facial skin over time.
3. Wash your skin gently
Cleansing is an essential part of caring for your skin. The key is to treat your skin gently.
