Having a healthy body to live in means a lot when it comes to quality of life. This is why it is important to eat healthy food, exercise and avoid chemical polution as much as possible. But, it isn’t just about being healthy – being comfortable in the body and feeling good about oneself is just as important. And, this is where makeup, skincare and fashion comes into the picture.

Makeup and fashion is all about enhancing your best features, because by enhancing your best features, your less than perfect features can be carefully disguised. Almost nobody has a perfect figure, and even the ones that do, will no longer be perfect after a few babies, or after the aging process takes its toll. The fact is, physical beauty is bound to fade over time. This is just part of the natural cycles of life. However, we can still enhance our best features, no matter what age we are.

The first two places that show signs of aging are the hands and the face. The skin on our hands and face are always exposed to extremes of temperature, UV exposure, wind and water. These extremes suck the moisture out of the skin, leaving it extra vulnerable to sun damage, age spots and wrinkle formation. I guess we have all seen what happens to the skin of a peach if it sits on the counter too long. After a couple of weeks, the peach skin wrinkles all over. It is the same with the skin. If it doesn’t receive any moisture on the surface, it dries up, just like the peach did.

However, this process can be reversed to a certain extent, simply by adding moisture back onto the skin. The moisture plumps the skin back up and reduces the appearance of wrinkles, as well as slowing down or preventing the formation of new wrinkles.

How can you tell if you have a good moisturizer? First of all, it has to contain moisturizing agents, and not just fats and oils. Fats and oils are emollients, which means that it makes the skin soft, but it doesn’t moisturize the skin because it doesn’t contain moisture.

Moisture is basically water, or something that can hold water on the surface of the skin, like hyaluronic acid, or something that can draw water to the skin, like glycerin, honey or lecithin. These moisturizing agents should be suspended in a lite creamy base containing some oils and fats, but not too much. A serum is better than a thick cream because the serum can penetrate the deeper layers of the skin, while a thick cream just sits on top of the skin. The oils and fats in the moisturizer will soften the skin and create a thin barrier to protect from the elements, but the main purpose of a moisturizer is just to moisturize the skin. A thick, oily barrier can then be added on top of the moisturizer if extra protection is needed.

Another good thing to look for in a good moisturizer is some kind of anti-oxidant that will protect against sun damage from free radicals. Sun damage causes not just wrinkles and unstable skin cells, but it can even cause skin cancer. Examples of anti-oxidants that protects the skin are green tea, acai berries and vitamin E.

To read about Green Beauty Cosmetic’s moisturizing serum with acai and green tea, CLICK HERE.

It is the same with your skin. Whether you are outside, enjoying the sun and the wind, or inside, letting your air conditioning dehydrate your skin, wrinkles are pretty unavoidable – unless you keep hydrating your skin.

Most of us end up with wrinkles sooner or later, and many wonder what we can do to minimize these signs of age and weather. There are countless products on the market that promise to reduce, or even remove your wrinkles, but few that keep their promises. It doesn’t matter how exotic the ingredients are – once you start getting lines on your face, they are basically there to stay.

However, we can still reduce the appearance of the lines. Like the example with the peach, the same applies to the skin. The drier it gets, the more wrinkles appear. And the opposite is also true. If we can replace the water, the appearance of wrinkles will also get much less. The water plumps up the skin and makes it look both younger and healthier.

The best hydrating agent that I have found so far is called hyaluronic acid. Hyaluronic acid is a natural component of the skin that is plentiful in young skin, but decreases as we age. If we can replace the hyaluronic acid, it plumps up the skin with water and this reduces the appearance of lines. Therefore, always check the labels on your skincare products. If it contains hyaluronic acid, it will highly benefit your skin and reduce the appearance of wrinkles.

Let’s face it – wrinkles are a natural part of life. As we move through our cycles, life will mark us in many ways. This is simply part of nature, but that doesn’t mean that we can take good care of ourselves. If we moisturize the skin, it will remain younger looking for a much longer time. So, don’t worry about a few lines on your face. Just keep moisturizing…

To visit my new website and learn about my new moisturizer that contains both hyaluronic acid and acai berries, CLICK HERE
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So, what can we do? If you don’t want to go to the extremes of having your face skin sanded off with steel brushes, or burnt off with 88% Phenolic acid, which is actually strong enough to kill you if it gets into your bloodstream too quickly, there aren’t too many options left. However, there are a few things you can do which can make your skin texture look more youthful and give you back some of that lost glow.

The most important thing, when it comes to youthful glow, is to find an exfoliator that is gentle enough to use daily. It should contain no apricot seeds or other abrasive substances, since these will damage your healthy skincells in addition to scrubbing away your dead cells, and that only ends up as inflamed and irritated skin, which is no good. Instead, find a scrub that contains oatmeal, cornmeal, crushed rose petals, or even white sugar. Think of it more like a polish than a scrub. If your scrub is gentle enough and you use it daily, it will give your skin a very smooth texture, and that in itself makes you look younger, even though your lines and wrinkles are still there.

The second culprit is your cleanser – stay away from soapy cleansers. Healthy skin is NOT supposed to feel “squeeky clean.” That only means that all your natural oils have been stripped away. Besides, soapy cleansers don’t remove makeup as well as creamy non-soapy cleansers, and when they strip the oils from your skin, they also change the natural acidic pH of the skin to alkaline, which is no good. Anytime the pH is off, bacteria can invade hair follicles and you’ll end up with pimples and boils. So, when it comes to cleansers, think creamy, non-soap, preferably pH balanced.

The toner should be alcohol free, of course! Alcohol dries out the skin, and who needs that? There are some astringents that don’t dry out the skin, such as citric acid, and in addition, it should also contain soothing agents, such as chamomile, marshmallow root and comfrey, and it must be pH balanced!

The moisturizer should be thin, like a serum, even for dry skin. Why? Because thick, heavy creams tend to sit on top of the skin, and even though they prevent water from evaporating from the surface, they don’t moisturize the deeper layers of skin and can therefore actually keep the skin dry. A serum can easier penetrate the skin and moisturize the deeper layers.

The most important ingredient in moisturizers is hyaluronic acid, which should be vegan and paraben free. Hyaluronic acid is a natural component of the skin that can hold its own weight in water 1000 times, and it also helps increase the penetration of other skincare ingredients, since it increases the moisture levels in the deeper layers of the skin. This substance will even plump up your skin enough that fine lines and wrinkles look less obvious. So if you don’t want the nasty side effect of using Retin-A, hyaluronic acid is a good alternative. It will make your skin look plump and young, and it is a totally harmless ingredient as well! According to the cosmetic database, hyaluronic acid is rated green, which is basically harmless.

And last, but not least, don’t forget to add a good sunscreen before you go out. Not only does it protect the skin from sundamage, but it can also prevent those nasty brown aging spots to occur.
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The main two are palmitoyl pentapeptide, also called Matrixyl, which is supposed to signal the body to make more collagen. The other one, Argireline, is supposed to work a little bit like Botox, by blocking the nerve impulses to the muscles so they’ll stop contracting and creating wrinkles by squinting. Sounds great…

So, I promptly went and bought products that contained these peptides. After a year of using these types of creams, with no effect on my crowsfeet, whatsoever, I started reading cosmetics reviews online. I wrote down a list of products that were supposed to be amazing, with great before and after pictures, but when I found reviews from actual users, they were not impressive at all.

One of the so called best creams on the market is called “Bellaplex.” It so expensive that they won’t even tell you how much product you are buying, and you even have to sign up for automatic monthly mailings, if I remember right. The reviews, however, were basically stating that the cream did nothing and that it was basically a waste of money.

This is when I decided that peptides were just another form of hype that allows the cosmetics companies to charge more money for their products.

Collagen is another ingredient that are popular in skin products. It is a structural protein that naturally occurs in your skin, and the idea is that if you add it to your skincare products, it can be absorbed by the skin and used to build up collagen wherever it needs it. However, there is a big hole in this theory – the collagen particles are actually too big to penetrate the skin. So, what exactly is the collagen supposed to do, sitting on top of your skin? You’ll just wash it off next time you clean your face! Seems to me, Collagen products are another scam, so save your money…

The only product I have tried that really works, is hyaluronic acid. Hyaluronic acid is a natural component of the skin that is reduced as we age. Hyaluronic acid has the ability to hold its own weight in water 1000 times, so what it does in skincreams is to bathe your skin in moisture. This will moisturize tissues that are no longer able to hold moisture on its own. It plumps the tissues, makes the skin look healthy, and makes the appearance of small lines less obvious.

So, if you want a product that creates visible effect, make sure it contains Hyaluronic Acid. Whether or not Peptides work, are highly questionable, they certainly didn’t do anything for my skin. And forget about collagen. You can’t add it on the top of your skin, and expect it to change the collagen inside your skin if it doesn’t penetrate. It won’t, and it can’t, if it just sits on top. But, hyaluronic acid will defintely make your skin look younger. (If you take before and after pictures of yourself, you’ll see a difference after 1 month).

And the best thing about hyaluronic acid is that it is totally green, and it is not an allergenic component, so you won’t end up with some nasty skin reaction.
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