Good Skin Through the End of Time
There are a few simple things we can do to help keep our skin in the best possible shape forever. Following a great skin care routine at home that truly meets the needs of our individual skin is one. (If you are not sure if your home care routine is doing great things for your skin, this can be figured out! Here are the standards you want to aim for.)
Following your great homecare routine consistently every single (nearly! mostly!) AM and PM is the next thing to do to ensure your best skin until the end of time. (This is why.)
Also, daily sun protection is key. (This is the QUEEN of keeping your skin in good shape.)
The Secret Weapon~
Within your great, regularly followed home care routine, your secret weapon is an active serum (or two) that is a good match for your skin. Your serum needs to be a power punch of collagen production support, with a good dose of pigment balancing, pore refining and wrinkle reduction oomph as well.
As we all have different skin, so too we need different serums! What your friend/daughter/neighbor/co-worker/rando on Facebook uses on her skin may actually suck for you! (Or it may just suck in general but is being marketed in a super appealing way on IG or QVC or YouTube or TikTok or FB.) Make sure YOUR serum is active enough to initiate positive changes (has clinical levels of reliable, active ingredients) without being so active that it causes irritation or dryness for your skin (meaning not only is it well-formulated, but its a good fit for you specifically). You can use two different serums (one in the AM and another in the PM) or use the same serum both AM and PM, depending on what your skin needs.
Here are some options~
Strengthen & Rebuild Vegan Serum Concentrate
Your stellar, regularly followed home care routine with an active serum or two is the foundation. This alone will get you pretty far! But if you wish, once you’ve got your homecare routine down, you can add in some professional care. Regular facials offer a lot (facial massage that stimulates circulation, pressure points that relieve tension, professional only products that rejuvenate on a deeper level than home care can, treatments like microcurrent and micro-channeling and LED light therapy and the Hydrafacial that seriously bolster the health and glow of your skin, plus the chance to have your skin seen by a pro who can suggest improvements to your homecare routine to make sure you are getting the absolute most out of it).
Time Still Passes~
While good home skin care (including good sleep, whole foods, exercise) and facials keep our skin healthier and younger looking, the years are still passing by, my darlings, and our natural aging is…still happening.
This is truly okay! But since we live in a world that is power washed with images of youthful everything and the message that only youth is attractive, it can feel like garbage to age. It can feel almost obligatory to have a medical cosmetic treatment done.
It is sad that aging is not met with more reverence and appreciation. It’s sad the ability to see the beauty that deepens in us as we age is mostly lost in our society. So, I’m just going to say it right here- there is nothing wrong with getting older! There is nothing wrong with looking older! And there is so much right with it.
Also, we need mature, older people. We need their resilience and wisdom and experience to help guide us all. We also really need to see people who look like themselves, and age in a myriad of individual ways. This helps us all see the beauty right in front of us. Glossy, re-touched or filtered images of beautiful people under thirty-five are lovely but they are not all there is. They are not enough. We need more.
In the midst of all this, how do we age?
We can feel like crap about aging, as if we are no longer anyone who matters because we can no longer be crammed into the small box that is considered conventionally beautiful and attractive by society at large. Looking older can feel embarrassing or shameful or scary or depressing. We may feel tempted to run toward cosmetic treatments to try to put ourselves back in that tiny box for at least a little while longer.
Or we can feel great about aging and enjoy it and enjoy ourselves and enjoy our lives and keep ourselves and our skin as healthy as we can, and just relax and be content with getting older. After all, at this point in our lives we know ourselves and we know how to live.
Or, we can feel good about aging, and still, at the same time, want to lift our jowls a bit, or smooth our forehead, or reduce some sun damage that goes beyond what good home care and facials can accomplish…just because we want to.
We may even vacillate between all these options. Aging can be a rough road to traverse. I wish I had an easy solution for us all, but in leu of that, I do know that you are gorgeous and necessary and vital already. Right now. And since the only way to traverse the road ahead is by being true to ourselves, let’s all begin by knowing that.
Since I get asked about this quite often, here is a quick run down on what is out there to make us look younger if we so choose…
What is Out There~
This is a bizarre and astonishing time we live in – there have never been more options available for improving our skin. This is not even an exhaustive list but it’s a pretty good one:
(While all these treatments are generally considered safe when properly administered, there is some risk, downtime and expense involved with all. All treatments will need to be repeated periodically to maintain the benefits.)
Botox or Xeomin: facial injection that can temporarily reduce or eliminate wrinkles (commonly used on “expression” lines, like crow’s feet, forehead lines, etc.,), by diminishing our facial muscles’ ability to contract.
Filler: facial injection that can temporarily restore volume to lips and cheeks and can add volume to sagging skin.
Laser, Intense Pulsed Light (IPL) and Broadband Light (BBL): These light energy treatments inflict very controlled, precise damage to the surface of your skin, to trigger the rapid production of new collagen. This can make your skin look heathier and smoother. These light treatments can also specifically reduce hyperpigmentation or acne or redness/visible capillaries in addition to being used for age prevention and age reversal.
Thermage (radiofrequency/RF) and Ultherapy (ultrasound): Both use heat that deeply penetrates to inflict controlled damage down in the dermal layer where collagen is produced to stimulate an over-all firming, smoothing effect on the skin.
Microneedling: Tiny needles rolled, stamped or mechanically pressed down into the dermal layer of your skin to instigate a natural, rapid healing response so your skin can quickly produce more collagen. This creates smoother, firmer skin. Platelet Rich Plasma (PRP) or Platelet Rich Fibrin (PRF), is often offered with microneeding to enhance the benefits (but I am not fully sold yet that it does).
Medical Grade Chemical Peels: Like laser, chemical peels inflict controlled damage on the surface of your skin to trigger a rapid healing response (which stimulates more collagen production) to leave your skin smoother. Peels are a little less precise than lasers.
Surgery: The most dependable way to “lift” our sagging faces, surgery (like a neck lift, partial face lift, eye lid lift, forehead lift, full face lift …) can do the most reliable lifting and offers the longest lasting results but is by far the most expensive and has the longest down time.
(There are other medical cosmetic treatments too, such as fat transfer, or buccal fat removal, etc., if you’d like to do a broader search, but we’ve covered many of the common treatments here.)
What Should We Do? Should We Do Anything?
I’ve been asked, “What is that thing that all the celebrities are doing? That’s what I want to do.”
The truth is, they are doing different things, and it’s not just one thing, in most cases. Sure, some are only doing a little thing here and there, and fewer still do nothing at all. But for most, and especially those that never seem to age, or look better/different as they age, or have taut skin forever, its more likely a combination of surgery (an eye lid lift, or neck lift, or forehead lift, or partial facelift, or full facelift, or all the lifts) then some kind of skin resurfacing (laser, IPL, BBL, chemical peels or micro-needling, or a combo of these) and some kind of firming treatment (ultrasound like Ultherapy or radiofrequency like Thermage) then finally filler and Botox to touch up the final imperfections that are left. Great home care products are a must, of course, and regular facials that include microcurrent, LED, peels, etc.,. are also a must. (Gossipy side note: Some celebrity estheticians charge between $1000 to $10,000 and up for a specialty facial prior to a red carpet event. Others are more reasonable at $400.)
This kind of protocol would seriously youth-ify anyone’s skin! It takes a big financial commitment though, and most of these treatments will need to be repeated periodically…forever. And even with serious help like this, we are still getting older. Signs of aging will still show up.
You may decide to skip it- who needs the expense, the hassle and even the small risk that something could go wrong? Or you may decide to do a cosmetic treatment, and love how it looks, and be glad you did it. Or you may try a treatment and find that you didn’t love it, and decide to not do anymore. (There is no wrong way, there is only the way that works for you.)
There is No Wrong Way to Go About This! Except…
If you do decide to explore getting a medical cosmetic treatment, where should you go?
This is a weird, Wild West time for cosmetic treatments. For example, dental offices and physical therapy offices and chiropractic offices and other practitioners that don’t have a specific background in skin care are offering cosmetic treatments for skin. (Yikes!!!)
It shocks me that practitioners with no real knowledge of skin physiology take a weekend course in PRP or RF or microneedling or whatever (or get “trained” by the salesperson who sold them the equipment) and then confidently offer a medical cosmetic treatment on their clients’ skin…an organ they have no formal education in treating.
There is so much more that goes into cosmetic treatments than just correctly following a generic protocol and not spreading infections. The state of your skin prior to treatment, and the skin care used before, during and after treatment are of supreme importance to successful outcomes. Your practitioner needs to be able to assess if you should have the treatment at all, or what you need to do prior to treatment to ensure a positive outcome. Your practitioner will have no idea how to do this if they don’t have a background in skin care.
This is my gentle note to you- if you do decide to do a cosmetic treatment, please go to a practitioner that is educated in skin physiology and esthetics, such as:
· a cosmetic dermatologist;
· an advanced/master esthetician;
· a medical doctor who is certified in cosmetic treatments (such as a board certified plastic surgeon’s office or board certified cosmetic surgeon’s office);
· an aesthetic/cosmetic nurse.
We want reputable, experienced experts working on our skin! Not rando practitioners who have no background in esthetics…and who do not understand how out of their depth they are.
Even when only considering experienced skin care practitioners, we still must do some due diligence. Reputable practitioners will offer a consultation with you to discuss what you want to accomplish with your skin. Talk with a few practitioners before choosing one. You don’t want to be talked into a “deal”, like “buy three treatments get one free” or whatever. You want someone who will listen to you, understand what you want, and then make astute, realistic suggestions for what is possible and how to achieve it. Ideally, the office you go to will offer multiple modalities (for example, surgery, injections, laser, RF and peels) so they can make a specific, customized recommendation for you, instead of only offering one treatment (like one type of laser or just RF and nothing else) and then advising that one treatment to everybody no matter what.
If you find an appropriate location and decide to have a treatment, the only wrong thing to do would be to stop following your good homecare routine. I met a woman once who gushed to me about how much she loved the laser treatment she’d received a few months ago. I was astonished because there was no sign that she’d had laser treatment. Her skin was already showing significant sun damage. When you don’t follow up cosmetic treatments with good homecare products and daily sun protection, the results will be much shorter lived, and you won’t really get your money’s worth. (So…broken record here…stick with a good home care routine no matter what.)
Tip from a Gentle Soul in Hollywood~
When I was still working in Santa Monica, CA., I occasionally worked on entertainment industry people (and their spouses and nannies) and had a (fairly well-known) actress as a client. She was incredibly natural in her approach to skin care. (Good skin care products, healthy lifestyle, good facials. That was about it.) She was beautiful in a subtle, quiet, wholly unique way. Even though she was middle aged, she said she did not want to have cosmetic procedures done that would keep her frozen in time, because then that time passes, and where does that leave you?
I’ve remembered that often over the years.
Final Thought~
Whatever you do, or don’t do, may you feel really good in your own skin. Always.
“Getting older makes you more alive. More vitality, more interest, more intelligence, more grace, more expansion.”
~Jamie Lee Curtis
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“I’m the sexiest I’ve ever been. And when I say that, I mean I feel the most myself.”
~Tracee Ellis Ross
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"When I tell you that you're beautiful, I don't just mean your appearance. I mean all of you; who and what you are, is beautiful."
~Steve Maraboli
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"You are imperfect, permanently and inevitably flawed. And you are beautiful."
~Amy Bloom
Blog written by Marna Herrington with Rich Earth Organic Skin Care Studio
Blog copy editing and polishing provided by Karen-Eileen Gordon (MsGordonLovesWriting@gmail.com)
This blog is not intended to take the place of in-person consultations with qualified skin care and health care practitioners. This blog is for the purpose of education and fun only.
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