As much as we enjoy the sun – and admire the beauty of the sun rising over a new day – we need to address the toll of sun exposure on our skin and our overall health by extension.
Skin care in your #2ndMiddleAge is not just about slowing the hands of time. Care and feeding of your skin has important implications for your overall health and well-being far beyond vanity.
Your skin is your body’s single biggest organ and also your gateway to good health. We learn more every day about how the skin plays a vital role in overall health, including:
- Serving as the body’s protective barrier.
- Helping to regulate temperature and prevent dehydration.
- Influencing the immune system and even behavioral health.
Consistency is key: Daily use of daily sunscreen, hats and vitamin C serum will protect your skin and may even reverse photoaging.
Sunscreen
The first pillar of consistent skin care is daily application of sunscreen with an effective level of Sun Protection Factor or SPF.
You might have been a sun worshipper in your youth, or perhaps you were a bookworm like me. Either way, if you grew up in the 60s and 70s, chances are your use of sunscreen was sporadic. Remember the days when instead of sunscreen skin was slathered with baby oil, literally baking the skin? Yikes! The good news is that it is not too late to use daily sunscreen to protect your skin.
Consistent use of sunscreen with an effective broad-spectrum SPF is one of the easiest and most cost-effective ways to prevent skin cancer. Your sunscreen should include SPF numbers (25, 30, 50, etc.) that tell you long the product will protect agains UV rays that burn our skin and play a key role in skin cancer. Skin cancer is on the rise globally and UV rays are the leading cause of skin cancer. I have not missed my morning sunscreen since the death of my father (z”l) from melanoma in 2019.
Winter or summer, sunscreen is critical sun protection for your skin. We generally associate over-exposure to the sun with summer. However, the worst sunburn I ever received was as a pre-teen on a family skiing trip. When my parents told me to put sunscreen on my face before heading out to the ski slopes, I was ignorant, young and careless. Squeezing out a minimum of sunscreen, I ran my hand across my face before heading out to ski. This led to a painful burn tracing the outline of my fingers, including blisters that burned off my top lip. Fortunately the damage was temporary, though it was a painful life lesson. I have been much more careful ever since, and I have the skin to prove it.
To protect your skin with sunscreen, apply sunscreen generously and evenly. Choose one with an SPF of 30 or above. You may find a morning moisturizer that includes sunscreen, and then you can layer it with additional sunscreen products for more protection. Apply sunscreen evenly to all exposed skin 15-20 minutes before sun exposure. Reapply at least every two hours, or more frequently if you are swimming or very active (sweating). And don’t forget your ears, neck and feet!
Wear A Hat
Hats are another effective, affordable way to prevent photoaging and cancer. As mentioned above, it is important to wear a hat with a brim and sunglasses to also protect your eyes from cataracts and macular degeneration. The EU and Israel rate hats for their sun protective abilities.
I know wearing a hat is not popular – when I worked in DC I was literally known as “the hat lady” for always walking into meetings with a hat. (I figured it was better than being known as “the cat lady.”)
Just do it.
Skin cancer doesn’t care if you don’t like the way you look in a hat, or the resulting hat-hair. If you feel like you look terrible in a hat, you have not yet found the right hat for you.
Find a hat with a good brim that you actually like and actually wear it.
Vitamin C Serum
Adding a Vitamin C serum to help reverse sun damage on your face, hands and arms. If you are already a committed sunscreen user, you may already be using a Vitamin C Serum as well.
You can find Vitamin C serum in any drugstore and many online stores. I prefer to make it at home For the freshest and most cost-effective Vitamin C Serum – better than anything you can buy at a fraction of the cost. There are good recipes for Vitamin C Serum all over the web, I use a recipe that I first found on Wikihow with small modifications. Adding Ferulic Acid enhances and stabilizes the Serum, helping it work better and last longer.
Because Vitamin C breaks down if exposed to light, it is helpful to close the bottle tightly. Store it in a drawer (out of the light). Use it for a month or so until it starts to change color. When it starts to look golden or yellow it is no longer fresh. I started making this only for myself, now my husband also uses it, so I double (or quadruple) the following recipe:
Ingredients
1/2 tsp vitamin C powder (heaping)
1/2 tsp powdered Ferulic Acid powder (optional)
1/2 T hot (not boiling) water
1 T Castor Oil or 1/2 T Castor Oil and 1/2 T Apricot Oil
1 T Glycerin (scant)
¼ tsp organic vitamin E oil (optional)
5 – 6 drops Lavender Essential Oil
Instructions
- Dissolve Vitamin C Powder in hot (not boiling) water, together with Ferulic Acid (optional)
- Add oils, vitamin E, lavender drops
- Blend (Use of a hand blender is particularly helpful if you are adding Ferulic Acid)
- Pour (carefully) into amber bottles with droppers – add a date label.
If you don’t have a health food store near where you live, all of the ingredients are available online (Amazon, iHerb, etc.).
Once you start making Vitamin C Serum at home you may never want to go back to buying less fresh, more expensive versions. When it starts to oxidize and lose effectiveness, it will begin to darken. That is your signal to make a new batch.
Give it a try and you may never go back!