Safer, Cheaper and Easier than a Facelift or Chemical Peel!

Get that glowing, even tone complexion by applying vitamin C to your skin!  See what Dr. Oz has to say about it:

Dr. Oz consulted with the nation’s top plastic surgeons to find alternatives to popular cosmetic surgical procedures. Safer, cheaper and easier than a facelift or chemical peel, these secrets can help drop a decade from your face.

Vitamin C is critical for your body and plays an important role in maintaining healthy, resilient skin. While young skin is full of vitamin C, aging skin naturally loses this nutrient over time. Other factors like exposure to UV light, pollutants and cigarette smoke compound the decline of vitamin C, contributing to signs of aging. The good news is that you can fight back by replenishing your skin’s vitamin C levels to help to combat and even reverse time’s effect on your face.

Wrinkles

One of the most powerful functions of vitamin C is its role in the production of collagen, a protein that gives your skin its elasticity. As you age, collagen breaks down and wrinkles begin to form. Stabilizing your skin’s levels of vitamin C can help to counteract wrinkle formation by increasing collagen production.

Age Spots

When it comes to treating age spots, you don’t need chemical peels and lasers – it turns out that vitamin C can have almost the same results! Age spots are essentially sun damage, and vitamin C is a powerful antioxidant, shown to reduce the number of sunburned cells as well as reverse age-related damage to skin. While it’s not a replacement for sunscreen, vitamin C protects against and may repair UV damage like discoloration and fine lines.

Your Anti-Aging Rx

Taking vitamin C through a supplement or food is beneficial to your health, but to specifically target signs of aging on your face, topical vitamin C is best. In fact, applying vitamin C to the skin can be 20 times more effective than taking it orally. Topical vitamin C is sold in a wide range of products from serum to lotions. Look for products that contain between 3% and 10% of vitamin C and include the active ingredient ascorbic acid or L-ascorbic acid. Pay extra attention to the packaging – all antioxidants, including vitamin C, are vulnerable to deterioration in the presence of air and light. Unless the product is in an airtight and opaque package, don’t buy it!

Apply topical vitamin C once a day, ideally after you’ve exfoliated in the morning to utilize vitamin C’s sun-protecting properties. On rare occasions, topical vitamin C can cause some mild dryness or flaking. Counteract this side effect with a moisturizer. This topical nutrient is safe to combine with all your other skin care products and even works synergistically with other antioxidants. For a super powerful anti-aging punch, combine vitamins C and E together.

The length of time from when you start using vitamin C until you see results varies with each person. While some people see changes as soon as 2-4 weeks, it may take others 6-8 weeks to see a difference. After around 6 months, you’ll reach the maximum benefits.

Try Perfect C Serum from MyChelle and get ready for all the compliments!

What’s Wrong With High SPF?

Theoretically, applying sunscreen with a sun protection factor – SPF – of 100 would allow beachgoers to bare their skin 100 times longer before the sun burns it. Someone who would normally redden after 30 minutes in the midday sun could stay out for 50 hours.

But for high-SPF sunscreens, theory and reality are two two different things. Many studies have found that people are misled by the claims on high-SPF sunscreen bottles. They are more likely to use high SPF products improperly and as a result may expose themselves to more harmful ultraviolet radiation than people relying on products with lower SPF.

The reason: People trust these products too much.

There are four key strikes against SPF values greater than 50:

1. Marginally better sunburn protection – Sunbathers often assume that they get twice as much protection from SPF 100 sunscreen as from SPF 50.  In reality, the extra protection is negligible. Properly applied SPF 50 sunscreen blocks 98 percent of sunburn rays; SPF 100 blocks 99 percent. When used correctly, sunscreen with SPF values in the range of 30 to 50 will offer strong sunburn protection, even for people most sensitive to sunburn.

2. Poorer balance – The chemicals that form a product’s sun protection factor are aimed at blocking ultraviolet B rays, which are the primary cause of sunburn and non-melanoma skin cancers such as squamous cell carcinoma (von Thaler 2010). Ultraviolet A rays penetrate deeper into the skin and are harder to block with sunscreen ingredients approved by the federal Food and Drug Administration for use in U.S. sunscreens.  Scientists know less about the dangers of UVA radiation, but the general consensus is that it is less obvious than UVB damage but possibly more serious.

A sunscreen lotion’s SPF rating has little to do with the product’s ability to shield the skin from UVA rays. As a result of the FDA’s restrictions on ingredients and concentrations, U.S. sunscreens offer far less protection against UVA than UVB, particularly those producrts with the highest SPF.  Because UVA and UVB protection do not harmonize, high-SPF products suppress sunburn but not other types of sun damage.

3. Consumers misuse high-SPF products – High-SPF products tend to lull users into staying in the sun longer and overexposing themselves to both UVA and UVB rays. Imbued with a false sense of security, people extend their time in the sun well past the point when users of low-SPF products head indoors. As a result, they get as many UVB-inflicted sunburns as unprotected sunbathers and are likely to absorb more damaging UVA radiation.

Philippe Autier, a scientist at the International Agency for Research on Cancer, which is affiliated with the World Health Organization, has conducted numerous studies on sunbathers and believes that high-SPF products spur “profound changes in sun behavior” that may account for the increased melanoma risk found in some studies. In two studies Autier confirmed that European vacationers spent more total time in the sun if they were given an SPF 30 sunscreen instead of an SPF 10 product (Autier 1999, 2000).

4. High-SPF products have greater risks to health – High-SPF products require higher concentrations of sun-filtering chemicals than low-SPF sunscreens. Some of these ingredients may pose health risks when they penetrate the skin, where they have been linked to tissue damage and potential hormone disruption. Some may trigger allergic skin reactions.  If studies showed that high-SPF products were better at reducing skin damage and skin cancer risk, that extra chemical exposure might be justified. But they don’t, so choosing sunscreens with lower concentrations of active ingredients – SPF 30 instead of SPF 70, for example – is prudent.

The sunscreen industry has defended high-SPF sunscreens as a way to combat consumer misuse (Ou-Yang 2012). Numerous studies show that sunscreen users apply just one-fifth to a one-half the quantity of sunscreen the maker recommends. When someone applies only 25 percent of the ideal amount of SPF 30, the sunburn protection on the skin is actually only 2.3. Someone who applies SPF 100 sparingly can wind up with a functional SPF as low as 3.2.  In the real world, these products are less effective than T-shirts, which generally have and SPF of 5.

EWG believes that manufacturers should stop selling high-SPF products altogether. Only then can consumers have clear, straightforward information about what’s in the bottle and how to use it to protect themselves.

The FDA has long contended that SPF higher than 50 is “inherently misleading” (FDA 2007). Australian authorities cap SPF values at 30;  European and Japanese regulators at 50 (Osterwalder 2009b).  In  2011, the FDA proposed a regulation to prohibit labels higher than SPF 50+,  but the agency has not completed work on this rule and put it into force.

High-SPF sunscreens are popular – and lucrative.  Sales of high-SPF products have been on the rise for at least a decade, so it’s no wonder that sunscreen makers are fighting to keep selling them. About 1-in-7 beach and sport sunscreens in EWG’s 2013 database advertises SPF values higher than 50+.  That’s virtually no change from the proportion of high-SPF products in last year’s sunscreen database.

source: EWG