Habits That May Lead to Premature Skin Aging
While skin of all ages is beautiful, time can dim your glow. Help keep your complexion plump, bright, and smooth by minimizing these habits that can cause premature skin ageing.
1. Persistently Rubbing Your Eyes Can Cause Dark Circles and Fine Lines
Under-eye bags are part of the natural ageing process, and occur when muscles around the eyes weaken. For most people, rubbing the eyes isn’t a problem and won’t cause any permanent side effects.
But continuous eye rubbing can create an issue by increasing inflammation in the area. There’s even a name for these bags and wrinkles: Dennie-Morgan lines, which can look almost like a black eye.
That’s not all. Pulling, tugging, and rubbing on delicate skin around the eyes can cause darkness.
2. Not Getting Enough Sleep Disrupts Skin Renewal
Sleep is essential for energy, concentration — and complexion. At night, skin goes into a renewal state.
Skimping on sleep can show on your face over time. Poor sleep (defined as five hours or less) is linked to increased signs of ageing, poorer skin barrier function, and lower satisfaction with appearance.
3. Sipping Out of a Straw Can Cause Fine Lines
Do you drink dark sodas, tea, and coffee through a straw? It may help prevent staining your pearly whites, but it can cause fine lines around your mouth, which is a sign of skin ageing.
When you’re sipping out of a straw, you’re activating the muscles around the lips: The more we activate those muscles, the more likely we are to get that crease in the skin. It’s the same reason that smokers also develop wrinkles around the mouth. Those lines can be traced to repetitive lip pursing.
4. Stress Releases Cortisol, Causing Collagen Breakdown
Every part of our body is affected by our stress, including your skin.
If you’re chronically worried (or losing sleep over stress), your body is pumping out stress hormones nonstop, which can cause premature ageing. Cortisol, the major stress hormone, breaks down collagen, which leads to sagging skin and wrinkles and causes inflammation. And chronic stress can speed up the ageing process because of that increased inflammation, research has shown.
5. Relying on Makeup for Sunscreen Leaves Skin Unprotected
To protect the skin from premature ageing, SPF is king. One past study found that ultraviolet (UV) light exposure was responsible for 80 percent of visible facial ageing signs, including wrinkles and pigmentation changes.
But if you’re relying on makeup containing SPF to block harmful UV rays, you may not be sufficiently protecting your skin. Most makeup protects against UVB rays but doesn’t block UVA rays, which cause fine lines, brown spots, enlarged pores, and crepey-ness.
Plus, you’d need to slather on a lot of cosmetics to get the sunscreen benefit. Makeup will give added protection along with SPF, but alone it is probably not enough.
6. Ignoring Your Neck and Hands Can Cause UV Damage
Ultraviolet light is the single most preventable risk factor for ageing. But even the most diligent SPF users may neglect their neck and hands, which may be why they’re one of the first areas to give away your age. Indeed, previous research found that women whose hands had visible veins and wrinkles were perceived to be older than peers with plumper hands.
As we age, we lose some elasticity. Moreover, the hands lose volume and fat, which is how you end up with translucent skin with wrinkles and age spots.Your skin gets thinner, basically, so then your hands don’t look as full. You start to see the tendons a little more, you start to see the vessels, and they look more wrinkly.
The neck can become discoloured and older-looking as well, usually as a result of long-term sun exposure.
7. Forgetting Sunglasses Can Damage the Eyes and Surrounding Skin
Sunglasses protect the eyes from UV rays, which can harm the eyelid, cornea, lens, and retina (and, as previously noted, UV rays can damage the delicate skin around the eyes, too).
Repetitive movements like squinting, laughing, and frowning etch lines and wrinkles into your face over the long term. The more you activate your muscles in a facial expression, the more you’ll start to see creases when your face is at rest.
8. Using Drying Soap Can Accentuate Wrinkles
Your grandparents may swear by the simple cleanser, but bars of soap often contain harsh detergents that strip skin of natural oils. Though dry skin doesn’t directly cause wrinkles, it makes them more noticeable. And dry skin [can’t] protect itself from allergens and irritants like bacteria and viruses.
Your choice of soap is especially important if your skin is on the sensitive side. If you’re a person with sensitive skin or have eczema or rosacea, then yes, the soap you use is going to have an effect.
