Slowing Down Aging May 12, 2009

   Tonight’s health alert got a little personal!  I was one of eight women who volunteered to put our faces in this fancy new machine that shows you how old your skin really is.  It looks at sun damage beneath the surface, wrinkles, spots, pore size, acne, and smoothness of your skin. We all showed up fresh faced and ready to hear the results. Oh, did I mention we ranged in age from 20-something to 50-something? That way we could get a good cross section of women at different times in their lives.  Surprisingly one of the 20-something women had the worst sun damage.  And this really was the point of the entire exercise – learning that sun damage is the number one thing that ages you.  Yes, your diet, exercise regime, smoking habits, and genetics play a role – but the one thing that ages you quicker than all of that is too much time in the sun unprotected.  The depressing part is that we can’t go back to when we were kids and slather the sunscreen on ourselves (who worse sunscreen in the 70’s?!) so we have to concentrate on not doing anymore damage to our faces.  Sunscreen, sunscreen, sunscreen is the order of the day.  Also, drink plenty of water, treat yourself to facials every once in a while and if you’re older, talk with your dermatologist about specific treatments that may work for your skin.

It was an interesting exercise to see what’s going on with my skin. I learned my pore size, smoothness, and spots were excellent, the the wrinkles around my eyes were typical, and there wasn’t any acne. Thank goodness, it’s not fair to have wrinkles and acne!  The machine we used was also able to gaze into the future and what our skin might look like if we did nothing to it. I had a few more wrinkles but I wasn’t too terribly shocked. I was given a simple prescription – less sun, more sunscreen, and lots of moisturizer. That I can handle.