Archive for the ‘Skin Solutions’ Category:
Yep, it’s a beauty treatment I’m talking about. I remember when these first few “wrinkle vanishing” serums came out a few years ago – well, make that probably a decade ago by now. They advertised as being these wrinkle reducing wonder creams and serums that they would actually show being applied to a person face. Miraculously, the persons wrinkles seemed to disappear after application.
Unfortunately, it was only a temporary effect. The common ingredient in such products is albumen, which is the stiff protein found in egg whites that helps to plaster things in place for a little while. And when I say a little while, I mean a very little while.
I tried these so called miracle serums, and they did seem to make wrinkles disappear temporarily, and smooth the facial skin out. However, once it stopped working it REALLY stopped working. My skin actually looked worse after it stopped because I then took on a sort of cracked appearance, and the wrinkles look magnified.
This was when I was in my early thirties, so imagine what it would do now that I’m in my late thirties. Basically, you can get the skin smoothing effects of the albumen by applying a home made mask of whipped egg white to the face.
It doesn’t look, smell or feel very pretty but it can be a nice infusion of protein and vitamins to the skin, and it does make the skin look a bit tighter, brighter and prettier the next morning. Oh, and make sure you don’t get any raw egg in your mouth or in your eyes, don’t want to get salmonella poisoning from a simple beauty treatment!
Albumen is basically just a very thick protein. It is what makes the white of the egg fry up all fluffy when it hits the heat. When applied in serums, it basically creates a temporary glaze and “filler” over fine lines, crows feet and wrinkles that gives the illusion of smoothing and wrinkles disappearing.
I’m sure you’ve noticed, these serums haven’t totally caught on, which is because they don’t work for very long. If they gave the results you see in the first ten minutes for an entire day, they’d be selling out all over the place.
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Filed under Skin Solutions
Tags:albumen, creams, egg, egg whites, face, fine lines, mask, protein, reduction, serums, temporary, wrinkle reducing
Well, I’ve been suckered in to buying another skin beauty device that I’m hoping pays off in nicer, younger looking skin. It’s the micro needle skin roller. I had never even heard of it before I happened across it online on Amazon, one of my favorite sites for beauty and everything else.
Have you ever heard of something that you never even thought of buying before because of the “other suggestions” that come up on Amazon? Well, it happens to have suckered me in several times on other things as well, including books, items for the house and cooking, and all kinds of other good stuff.
The micro needle roller that I bought has .5 mm tiny needles. You can go up to 1.5 mm but I figured I’d better start off short since I heard it can be kind of painful. What is it you ask? You’re probably dying of curiosity by now as I was when I saw the name of the product.
It’s not a torture device if you thought that. It’s a little roller that has teeny tiny needles on it that are so fine you are not supposed to feel them too much. However, a lot of reviewers of the micro needle system say that they feel pain or discomfort.
For this reason, they offer a numbing cream that you can use with it. Well, it may not be offered by the same company, but it’s offered in conjunction with it. The numbing cream helps you to use the micro needle system without as much discomfort.
Why needles? Well, they are supposed to put tiny piercings into the skin, allowing for your skincare creams, lotions and serums to penetrate much more deeply and get to work on the deeper layers of the skin.
So, if you are using wrinkle and fine lines cream, then you should get better results because the product is able to work on the deeper layers of the skin. Or, if you are using sunspot fading creams, you should notice a significant difference in them because the piercings in the skin help the product to get down deeper and address the problems.
I ordered it yesterday so I should be getting it in the mail soon. I will be providing a review on the micro needle skin roller soon. Mine was just over twenty bucks.
We focus a lot on skin care products for things like clearing up acne, targeting skin conditions like rosacea, and helping to refine the skin and keep it young and supple looking with anti wrinkle and anti aging products and creams.
But what a lot of people don’t realize is that ninety percent of the way your skin looks has not a lot to do with the products you use on the outside (although they are of course important as well), but more to do with your diet and what types of foods you typically put into your body every day.
New research has shown that eating the right foods makes your skin glow like no tan in this world can. That’s right. When pictures of people who had a nice tan on their face were shown to volunteers, versus people who ate a lot of particular types of foods in their diet, the volunteers tended to pick the people who at well versus those that had the tan.
They said that the people who ate better just looked healthier! And that is because of a certain type of foods those people ate a lot. If you eat a lot of antioxidants, and more particularly, a nutrient called beta carotene, which is found in brightly colored orange and yellow fruits and veggies – most notably carrots and oranges – then you actually get a “glow” from the inside!
That is why these tanning pills, which purport to make your skin tan just by taking a pill, are actually usually composed of a high amounts of beta carotene. These supplements often make people take on a jaundiced look though, because their concentrations are too high and too unnatural.
Peopl have even reported getting orangish colored whites in their eyes from taking these supplements, so I would never recommend them – instead try a great, natural looking self tanner.
Remember to eat your carrots and your other veggies with beta carotene like tomatoes, squash, sweet potatoes and more – and you should notice that your skin really starts to look great and just take on a better overall hue. You will not only look healthy, but you’ll feel like a million bucks if you increase your intake of these types of foods!
Vitamin C is a great vitamin to include in your daily diet for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is your skin’s health and vitality. It’s an excellent antioxidant, and it’s one of the vitamins that you don’t need to worry about getting too much of since it’s water soluble, and it is flushed out of your body on a daily basis. One of my favorite ways to get this important vitamin is to take a daily dose of Emergen-C.
I especially like to take it this way because this powdered drink also contains alpha lipoic acid, another essential nutrient for healthy and resilient skin. Alpha lipoic acid is a recycling facilitator for vitamin C. In other words, alpha lipoic acid essentially recycles vitamin C in the body, allowing a little to go a long way, and carrying the effects of one dosage further. Why is vitamin C so great for the skin?
It is one of the main reasons that collagen gets manufactured by the body. Without vitamin C, kiss a lot of your collagen production good bye. This is why it’s important to get this vitamin in your diet, and possibly even to add a good supplement to your diet since collagen is a great anti aging force. It supports the integrity and structure of the skin – it bonds it together and prevents wrinkles and fine lines. It plumps the skin out, making it look more youthful and supple, and is therefore a major factor behind young looking skin.
Because vitamin C is also a potent antioxidant, it also helps protect skin cells against early death and mutation into deadly skin cancer cells. When your skin cells die, your skin takes on a less vibrant look. The idea behind a lot of these abrasion types of treatments is to renew the topical skin cells so the skin continues to look new and healthy. Well, vitamin C helps do that, only from the inside of the body.
By the way, vitamin C is also excellent when utilized as a part of topical skin care products. I love vitamin C-based cleansers and moisturizers. Some of my favorite anti aging and anti wrinkle products include vitamin C in their ingredient list.
What is a varicose vein? Well, varicose veins are really seen as a huge cosmetic faux-pas, obviously. But what they signify can be really scary. These large, bulging veins that appear blue in color or purplish usually occur on the legs, and they usually are a telltale sign that your blood is not pumping up to your heart as effectively as it should be. Because of this, and because of that wonderful force called gravity that we love so much as we age, the blood pools in the veins in the legs, and these varicose, bulging veins begin to appear.
One of the options that is available is one called sclerotherapy, where injections are used and they actually sort of “dry up” the veins. Laser therapy can also help with varicose veins, and there is also a radiotherapy that can help to break up these veins and make the blood flow again, or actually sort of help them empty out. How it works, I don’t know, but they actually have some pretty effective therapies right now for this problem.
Varicose veins become even more problematic as we age, which is due to the fact that our circulation just isn’t usually as good as it used to be as we age, and also because over time and gravity, the blood just tends to pool there. Activity and keeping a very active life will help, as well as minimizing the blocks of time you are sitting. Elevating legs while sitting also may help prevent these.
And what about their cousin, which is more common, the nasty little spider vein? Well these thankfully are not signs of a larger problem, they’re just a cosmetic pest that most of us get as we get older. These are little veins that break from pressure over time, and you may get them worse if you are overweight or if you carry a lot of weight for a period of time such as when you get pregnant. Or if you wait tables or have a job where you carry lots of weight too.
Laser therapy can be incredibly helpful for these spider veins. Now, what about stretch marks? Well, these are a little trickier to treat, but there are some fantastic stretch mark creams that can help to minimize their appearance. There are also cosmetic treatments that help, but they usually take several visits. These are fraxel laser treatments, which are expensive and take several treatments, a normal laser may help as well, but the fraxel is supposed to work best on these little buggers.
Stretch marks are a common problem that is mostly noticed in women because we bare children and the quick weight gain and weight loss of pregnancy and child baring often lead to a lot of stretch marks, but also affects men. Men get stretch marks a lot around their midsection, where their thighs meet their torso, because of growth spurts, whereas women tend to get stretch marks on their thighs and on their bellies.
Stretch marks are notoriously hard to treat as they are essentially damaged skin that has been stretched beyond repair, which has a very difficult time coming back to it’s normal pigment. It’s the same effect as stretching a rubber band and keeping it that way for a few days, then letting it go back to it’s normal size.
Well, if you conduct this experiment, you will see that the rubber band does not return to it’s normal size, nor does it return to it’s normal color where the most stretching happened. It gets little white lines, much like stretch marks, where the most breakage of it’s bonds occurred.
Our skin is the same. Our skin is made of pliable small cells called collagen, and part of the reason we take on an aged appearance as we get older is because this collagen and the flexibility it gives our skin breaks down and no longer is as stretchy as it used to be.
Good stretch mark treatments help to intensively moisturize the skin, and also contain ingredients which help to mend damaged skin and to help the skin repair and rebuild itself where the trauma occurred, whatever it may have been from – pregnancy, weight gain and extreme weight loss, or a sudden growth spurt when you were younger.
Some of the ingredients you may want to look for include shea butter, peptides and olive oil, all of which are not only nourishing and repairing, but also which have excellent hydration qualities to provide intense hydration.
Dehydration is the ultimate enemy of getting rid of stretchmarks, and a good stretch mark cream penetrates and provides deep down moisturizing, not just topical, superficial moisturizing, so it minimizes the appearance of discoloration.
