If you have skin, then you have a problem. At least if you care about how you look, and about the health of the very thing that defines your appearance. Because in the skin care game, to do nothing is to lose. And in the skin care business, the more things you try to do, the more money there is to be made.
The entire skin care industry is based on one sad, inescapable truth of human biology: the older you get, the worse for wear your skin will become, and it'll show. No one escapes this fate.
Healthy, youthful-looking skin is like anything else worth keeping - knowledge and regular maintenance is required. If you never provided preventative care for your car, how long would it continue to run? If you never watered your garden or fed your pet, how long would your roses and your little critters live? Your skin is no different. Left to the natural process of aging, your skin is heading down a road that will end up with you looking more like Keith Richards than Dorian Grey.
Unless, of course, you intervene. And that's precisely what the skin care industry is banking on you to do. And they're doing it with the full awareness that you are not in possession of all the facts.
There are potions and remedies for aging skin on the shelf in every grocery store and pharmacy in the known universe. Words like moisturizes, lanolin and collagen, or the clinchers, "reduces wrinkles" and "prevents aging", are tossed about - easily mistaken for promises - without the consumer really having the slightest clue what any of it means. The people who manufacture and sell this stuff understand one undeniable fact of human nature, and it's making them rich: people will try anything, absolutely anything, that promises to make them more youthful and beautiful.
Anti-aging products are the modern Garden of Eden apple - go ahead, take a big juicy bite, plunk down your money and live forever, or at least leave a beautiful corpse if you don't. But like that fabled apple, there's a price. A downside that doesn't appear on the label. And the fact that the product may not work at all is only the beginning of it.
Skin creams are all over map when it comes to ingredients, actual results and the research that backs up the promises. And while only a cynic would believe that it's all a big consumer fraud, it's also true than some of the ingredients found in popular skin cream products are not only ineffective, they are actually skin irritants, sometimes even toxic substances.
How can this be? Because there's more to marketing skin creams than results - manufacturers know that texture and scent and short-term fixes are important to some consumers, so they include those ingredients in their formulations, when in fact they do little or nothing to actually improve the health of skin at all. And here's where those cynics are spot-on correct: it really is all about the money.
A little knowledge can go a long way when it comes to selecting a safe and effective skin cream, and in understanding why it works when you do. It begins with some insight into how and why the skin changes and deteriorates over the years, and what substances have a meaningful impact, good and bad, on that process.
Not all anti wrinkle creams are bad for your skin or ineffective but it usually pays well to do your research first. Study the reviews of a particular brand and the ingredients of the beauty cream before making a purchase.
