How Vitamin C Helps to Protect Your Skin
You must have heard your parents emphasizing about a vitamin rich diet. These vitamins boost our body’s immune system and are very essential for the health of our skin. Skin care researches have shown evidence that vitamin C can help in treating skin problems like sun spots, burns, wrinkles, blemishes, age spots and even other hyper pigmentation issues. This water soluble vitamin, also known as ascorbic acid is not produced by our body and thus has to be included in our daily diet.
Skin Benefits from Vitamin C
Vitamin C basically acts in two ways. First, it is a potent anti oxidant as it safeguards the skin from photo aging by preventing the formation of free radicals. These free radicals are formed by reaction between UV rays and skin cells, proteins and lipids. Vitamin C effectively resists against such reactions in the skin. By reducing the formation of free radicals, vitamin C helps avoid sun damage as well as it saves the skin from premature aging, following exposure to UV rays. Second, vitamin C reduces melanin formation in the skin. Melanin is a skin pigment which is responsible for giving your skin a dark shade. Hyper pigmentation occurs as a result of increased melanin formation.
Oral Intake and Topical Application of Vitamin C
The above two benefits of vitamin C suffice to re-establish its importance for your skin’s health. Skin care experts have started using vitamin C extracts into the design of their product formulations. Since your body cannot produce vitamin C on its own, it becomes all the more necessary to consider other ways of providing this essential nutrient to the skin. Apart from including it in the diet, you can opt for skin care products based on vitamin C. Being a water soluble vitamin, it gets readily absorbed by the skin and penetrates into the deeper layers. The topical application of such vitamin c rich compounds (like Obagi C Rx healthy skin system) show visible skin benefits as compared to the dietary intake. Actually when consumed orally. All the nutrients have to first undergo a cycle of absorption, digestion and metabolism to show final results.
A healthy, younger looking skin without age spots, sun damage, blemishes or dark patches is not very hard to acquire. You only need to be conscious about the needs of your skin. Aging and exposure to UV rays both damage the skin by adding to the concentration of free radicals. If you take care to inhibit the formation of these free radicals, it definitely helps benefit the skin against the above two delimiting factors (aging and sun damage). Also vitamin C curbs melanin production by the skin cells, making your skin look brighter and more evenly pigmented.
To conclude, include vitamin C in your daily diet as well in your daily skin care regime and enjoy its benefits in the form of younger looking skin.
The Author:
Esthetician Naomi Andrews
Photo. Tamanna Rumee
