Sun Damage & Skin Aging
Natural Aging is Bad Enough, Don’t Add Sun Damage to your Skin’s Workload
Aging starts from the day you are born. No joke. You start to age the minute you’re born. All the cells in your body are in the best condition they’ll ever be when you’re born. From thereon, it’s a gradual decline in cell function, and later a rapid decline. We age because our organs age and eventually break down. Like any machine, nothing stays new forever.
This is especially true for skin. Skin is the largest organ of our body and serves as the first point of defense against our external environment. It takes a huge beating from the sun and other external insults.
Skin works really hard. It works hard to keep microorganisms out, to control water loss, to keep our skin soft and resilient, to detoxify the body, to regulate heat, and much more. Most of all, it works hard to deal with the free radicals caused by the sun, pollution, and environmental toxins.
You can’t stop your body from naturally aging. But you can control how much sun damage you get. Wearing sunscreen is such a simple yet effective way to slow down skin aging.
How Sun Damages Skin
Two words: FREE RADICALS. (To be technically correct, it’s Reactive Oxygen Species, which I will discuss when we get to anti-aging. But for the sake of simplicity, let’s call them free radicals.)
Free Radicals
Free radicals are bad. Really bad. They are unpaired electrons that attack everything around it, rendering them dysfunctional: proteins such as collagen and elastin, epidermal lipids, membrane lipids, mitochondria, other cellular organelles, and worst of all, DNA. The very last thing you want to do is expose your DNA to damage.
The DNA is the ‘brain’ of your cells. It contains the genetic code that dictates what proteins get made (proteins pretty much run everything in the body). When your DNA is attacked, mutations can form, causing cancer. Most of the time, our cells repair DNA damage. When they can’t, they die (it’s called apoptosis, self-inflicted cell death). The ability of cells to repair DNA slows down as we age (this goes back to why our organs age).
UV radiation in sunlight is a major trigger of free radicals. When UV radiation contacts skin, it reacts with oxygen in the air, which causes a free radical chain reaction.
Sun + Oxygen + Skin –>
Nasty Free Radical Chain Reaction in Skin –>
DNA/Protein/Membrane Damage or Cell Death –>
SKIN AGES!
Pigmentation
UV also triggers melanin production, which causes pigmentation, those dreaded spots or areas of discoloration that tend to accumulate with age. Darker skin tones are more prone to pigmentation, especially post-inflammatory pigmentation. So while sunscreen may not be needed for preventing burning, it is definitely needed for reducing the risk of pigmentation.