As you get older, you notice that you start having health issues. Your start to notice aches in various parts of your body; you get tired easily and sometimes, you experience heart burn after having a feast. There is one part of your body that experiences dramatic changes as you age and that is your skin.
Your skin also becomes rougher and develops lesions and slack as the loss of elastic tissue or elastin in the skin causes skin to hang loosely. Skin becomes more transparent with the thinning of the epidermis (surface layer of the skin). You will also notice that your skin is more fragile and becomes more easily bruised because of thinner blood vessel walls.
“Our skin is at the mercy of many different factors that set in motion the start of the aging process like sunlight, harsh weather, bad habits, cosmetics that you apply and stress, among others,” said Dr. Grace Carole Beltran, a dermatologist, dermatologic surgeon and genitologist.
“The skin definitely changes together with the external factors and that could hasten it. Genetics definitely has a say on these changes too,” she added.
Lifestyle, habits
Other factors that could affect your skin include lifestyle, diet and other personal habits. Smoking and alcohol, for example, “can produce free radicals that can damage cells and produce premature wrinkles.”
“Exposure to the sun, on the other hand, leads to photoaging [dermatoheliosis] pollution, loss of subcutaneos support [fatty tissue between your skin and muscle],” Dr. Beltran said. “Other factors that contribute to aging of the skin include stress. gravity, daily facial movement, obesity and even sleeping position.”
Aside from the changes brought about by aging, Dr. Beltran pointed out that other things could set in. These include a crawling, pricking sensation, skin dryness and flakiness, skin darkening and thickening usually on the face, thinning of the skin elsewhere so that scars which were not present during your younger years suddenly become evident. Veins also become more prominent and are easily bruised.
So how do you look after your skin when you reach your twilight years? Dr. Beltran said “prevention is the key” to skin care. This means that when you reach 25 years of age, you should “be conscious about all these factors that hasten the aging process so that as early as that, you can change your lifestyle and habits.”
Start early
“You can alsw o start early when it comes to sun protection. In fact, this should be done as early as during childhood or once the child starts getting exposed to sunlight,” she said. “Rejuvenating creams, procedures such as botox, lasers, fillers, whitening packages can be started at age 25 to 40 years old, while ultraformer/ultherapy can be started later like for those people in their 50s to 60s.”
Dr. Beltran emphasized that the procedures will be recommended based on the severity of the age problem. A combination treatment is what is best for most, she added. Then as you reach the senior citizen bracket “surgical procedures might be the answer to improve on how one would look.”
Since senior citizens have been locked up at home because of the Covid-19 pandemic, Dr. Beltran advised them to eat healthy, exercise regularly and avoid alcohol although “they can take one glass of red wine every day.”
“Avoid stress and do not worry to much about this pandemic but at the same time protect yourself by not going out,” she said. “Enjoy your time with your family. Do things you did not do before like engage in reading, the arts, playing musical instruments, writing stories, cooking, cleaning the house and most importantly, pray.”