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.

The second group of ingredients you need to look for are peptides.

The third group is antioxidants. Antioxidants reduce free radicals, which destroy collagen…Use a host of antioxidants. Don’t buy a product with just one ingredient in it; you’ll be missing out on half a dozen others. That’s why I consolidate them. I like products that contain multi-active ingredients. The antioxidants to look for are green tea, vitamin C (which also serves as an antioxidant), coenzyme Q10, emblica (used in ayurvedic medicine), grapeseed extract, selenium and lycopene. I put all of these in my products, in the same concentrations that you would find in a single-ingredient product.

And finally, there are enzymes in the skin that break down collagen. Retinol helps block this degradation, so it’s the final key ingredient to look for.”
—Dennis Gross, MD: Manhattan-based dermatologist, creator of MD Skincare, and author of Your Future Face