While you enjoy the weather- jogging, walking, biking, picnicking or chasing your kids and grandkids in the park- don’t forget to protect your skin.
Skin care simply means caring for your skin, our biggest organ, the one that protects us from an onslaught of potential hazards and diseases. Skin care has two goals:
1. Protect
2. Prevent
We can help prevent skin cancer and accelerated aging of our skin by protecting the skin from what is considered by doctors and skin experts as the skin’s number one enemy: the harmful UV rays of the sun.
Not to be contradictory, but a little bit of UV exposure is good. Natural sun light helps our bodies to make vitamin D, a substance necessary for bone strength and to fight certain diseases such as jaundice, rickets and psoriasis. Exposure to early morning light helps wakes us up and may even help ward off depression.
It’s the darn UVA and UVB rays that cause havoc on our skin.
The World Health Organization states, “Prolonged human exposure to UV solar radiation may result in acute and chronic health effects on the skin, eyes, and immune system.” The World Health Organization reports 2.5 million types of skin cancer diagnosed each year. Many are preventable.
Two types of damage harmful UV rays can incur: damage caused by sunburn (the scientific term is erythema) and the damage cause by photoaging. Photoaging is a fancy way of saying early wrinkles and sagging skin due to too much sun.
It’s Easy to Keep Skin Beautiful and Protected
We’ve all heard the statistics. But do you know how easy it is to take avoid preventable skin cancer and early wrinkles and sagging?
It takes about two minutes to protect skin in the morning and at night. You need two minutes twice a day and some very basic skin care products: a cleanser, toner, and moisturizer. There are other helpful products but these three are the essentials. Look for products that are free of alcohol, paraben and added fragrances. These products are more gentle and nourishing.
Protecting the skin- specifically your face and neck where most of the exposure hits- entails is washing the face, using a toner and basic protective moisturizer and an eye cream. Make sure the day cream has a SPF in it (or use a SPF on top of the moisturizer). Day creams act to protect the skin while night creams work to restore the stress of the day and heal the damage of the day.
We have enough on our plate to worry about. Skin cancer and premature aging don’t need to be among our list of concerns.
Beauty = healthy. Healthy is clean and protected. Wash, Tone, Moisturize. Two minutes. Easy and breezy and done.
Melissa AuClair works by day as a skin care and cosmetic consultant and a blogger and writer moving towards a location independent lifestyle by night. You can follow her on Twitter @melissaauclair or on her blog http://www.launchyourcreativelife.com/blog
