Beauty Tips: Beautiful Skin, Anti-Aging, Age-Gracefully

I’ve been obsessed with the fight against aging since the tender age of twenty-one. My mother, on the other hand, considers each birthday a blessing and, subsequently, her skin-care routine is of the soap-and-water variety. Somewhere in the middle is a happy medium. Combine the courage to grow old gracefully with some simple, skin-saving anti-aging strategies, and you’ll age happily and beautifully. Here’s how some of the country’s top beauty experts say to do it:

The Secret to Beautiful Skin.

Four ingredients to look for.
“The first thing you need to do is boost collagen [collagen is to skin what calcium is to bones—it keeps it firm and strong], and the best way to do this is through vitamin C, topically applied. It is more important to apply it than to consume it, because it’s more direct. You would have to consume one hundred vitamin-C tablets a day to get the same benefit to your skin as you would in a vitamin-C gel. When you take a vitamin-C tablet, it goes into your bloodstream and goes through your whole body; it’s diluted so much….Your skin needs it in a more direct form.