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Stop listening to the Marketing Sensationalism and know what your moisturizer needs to have any value on your skin!

The 5 Things Your Skin Simply Can't Go Without

    1. Antioxidants
    Without question, topically applied antioxidants are essential for skin and there are many brilliant ones that can and should show up in a skin-care product. Antioxidants vary from different forms of vitamins A, C, and E; superoxide dismutase; beta carotene; glutathione; selenium; green tea, soy extract, grape extract, pomegranate extract, among dozens of others. And the more included in your skin-care product, the better!

    Antioxidants can:
    Reduce or prevent some amount of the daily free radical damage and inflammation that destroy skin over time.
    Boost the effectiveness of sunscreens and help skin resist environmental assaults.
    Help skin heal and produce healthy collagen.
    Become unstable when packaged in a jar because, once opened, jars allow air in and cause antioxidants to deteriorate.  


    2. Skin-Identical Ingredients
    Healthy and young skin naturally contains substances that keep it smooth, retain water, protect from the environment, fight infection, and repair skin's actual outer and inner barrier structure. These ingredients range from ceramides to lecithin, glycerin, fatty acids, polysaccharides, hyaluronic acid, sodium PCA, collagen, elastin, proteins, amino acids, cholesterol, glycosaminoglycans, and many more.

    Skin-Identical ingredients function to:
    Provide skin with the ingredients it needs to repair its outer barrier; your skin can't hold moisture or look less wrinkled if the outside barrier is damaged.
    Mimic the actual structure of skin to prevent moisture loss and make skin look smooth.
    Help reinforce the skin's natural ability to function normally and fight environmental stress.
    Dramatically improve skin's texture and, with continued use, can eliminate dry skin.  


    3. Cell-Communicating Ingredients
    As a result of sun damage, age, and hormone fluctuations, skin cells become permanently damaged, which means they regenerate into irregular, mutated, rough, defective, and older cells. One way the skin can begin to produce healthier, younger cells is to give it substances that can communicate to a cell to stop making bad cells and start making better ones. It is an exciting area of skin care! The key players in this group are niacinamide, retinol, synthetic peptides, lecithin, and adenosine triphosphate.

    Cell-communicating ingredients are believed to:
    Have the ability to tell a skin cell to look, act, and behave more like a normal, healthy intact skin cell would.
    Communicate with other cells that are causing damage, essentially telling them to stop behaving badly.
    Reduce cellular damage that leads to destruction of skin's supportive elements, thus preventing significant wrinkles.

    4. Sunscreen
    The sun ages the skin and causes skin cancer—in fact, sun is one of the most potent natural carcinogens around! About 75% of what we think of as aging is caused by unprotected sun exposure. Sun damage begins within the first minute of the skin being exposed to the sun. Other than sun smart behavior, use of a daily sunscreen is vital. To ensure you're getting sufficient UVA protection, your sunscreen must contain one or more of these active ingredients: titanium dioxide, zinc oxide, avobenzone, ecamsule (Mexoryl SX), or Tinosorb.

    Daily use of a well-formulated sunscreen should:
    Prevent damage to your skin in the form of wrinkles, chronic inflammation, and "age spots," not to mention skin cancer!
    Adequately protect against both UVB (burning rays) and UVA (aging rays) sun damage—what's known as broad-spectrum protection.
    Be rated a minimum of SPF 15, though anything above SPF 45 is overkill.
    Remain the only real difference between a daytime moisturizer and a nighttime moisturizer.