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You shouldn't have to be great at chemistry to understand why your skin is aging prematurely. Peptides? Electrons? Free radicals? You just want young-looking skin! Lots of corporations talk a lot about hard-to-understand scientific explanations to convince you to buy their products, which are usually assortments of chemicals which could possibly irritate your skin. Since most of us are not scientists ourselves, we are forced to take their word for it and try their 'miracle products'. Actually, you've probably tried everything from orange juice to cereal, that supposedly has antioxidants, hoping and trusting that it will reverse the signs of aging.

The science behind aging is not so difficult to understand if we explain it in a simpler language. When your skin starts to look 'aged', it's usually due to a combination of factors. Pollution in the environment, and damage from the sun's rays has a lot to do with it. Besides this, the other reason your skin ages is because after years of using oxygen, some of the atoms in your body start to lose their electrons, damaging them and making them unstable. We call these damaged cells 'free radicals'. Free radicals ,as you can imagine, are not good for the body, because they are essentially diseased cells, and even worse, they alter our DNA, resulting in more diseased and dead cells. Worst of all, in order to become stable, they try to take electrons from the natural proteins in our skin. This, as you can imagine, starts a snowball effect of premature aging problems in our skin, because as free radicals take electrons from other cells, they leave those cells with fewer electrons also!

Of course, our bodies are very intelligent, and we do have some lines of defense against these things. There are enzymes in the body which try to neutralize these free radicals. But, according to scientific studies, the principal solution to get rid of these cells is by special chemicals called 'antioxidants', which are principally found in our diet and through external supplements. For a long time, most people haven't known too much about antioxidants, other than hearing the name. However, the scientific community has started making public some of the exciting breakthroughs about this topic, and the media has begun to get in on the action and alert the general population. This is especially exciting for athletes, who could use antioxidants to enhance their performance.

Natural Ingredient Used to Fighting back against Premature Aging

The way antioxidants work, we now know, is because they are stable atoms with an extra electron to share. Since the antioxidants help the free radicals in this way, instead of just destroying them, they maintain balance in the system and avoid the unnecessary death of the diseased atoms. The antioxidants then help the cells by neutralizing external forces (such as damage from the sun, pollution, etc) and internal factors (such as stress, emotions, metabolism, and the presence of excess oxygen). What better way to keep your face looking young and healthy than to give it these antioxidants that it so desperately needs? There are various ways to get antioxidants. You can find antioxidants in foods rich in vitamins (especially vitamin C), and in drinks like green tea. Fruits and vegetables that have beta carotene (like carrots, peaches, spinach, etc), are also wondeful sources. Dietary supplements like these are widely recommended to stop the effects of premature aging on your skin. However, now we have to deal with the other problem we talked about, which is the damaging effects of the sun on your skin. To top it all off, every passing day the ozone layer gets thinner and thinner, causing more and more problems for our skin.

Conscious of the benefits of these antioxidants, scientists have recently started to create skin care products from natural ingredients that you can apply as a face cream, which will neutralize your free radicals and protect your skin against UV rays that cause skin damage. They even contain a special ingredient that shows your damaged and abused skin cells how to behave like normal healthy skin again! This has been such an extraordinary breakthrough for the medical and scientific communities. So, to summarize, if your skin is aging prematurely, all is not lost. Remember effective ways to keep your skin soft, young and rejuvenated: eat lots of vitamins, drink green tea, and try incorporating creams that use natural ingredients to insure your body is getting all the help it needs to revive damaged cells. If you really make the effort to do this, you should start to notice a difference in your skin in the blink of an eye!