Antioxidants are either natural or artificial/synthetic substances that can boost your health in many ways by limiting the amount of cell damage in your body. For instance, antioxidants can go a long way in helping you improve your immunity and reducing the risk of certain chronic diseases like cancer and heart conditions.
In addition, antioxidants can also help your skin by improving its condition and maintaining its health. To learn more about how antioxidants can help your skin (and what kind of antioxidants can work), you can go through the following sections.
Based on this information, you can then improve your antioxidant content and skincare.
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How Do Antioxidants Work?
When it comes to our bodies, there are natural and normal levels of free radicals present. In limited amounts, free radicals do not usually cause much harm to the body; however, it is when they start going beyond this standard that they can pose a risk.
Excess levels of free radicals can enter the body through environmental factors such as pollutants, smoke, harsh sunlight and more. These can then create oxidative stress, altering and weakening the cells and the DNA and exposing our bodies to diseases.
However, antioxidants can help fight against this kind of oxidative stress by neutralizing the free radicals. Such antioxidants include vitamin C, vitamin E, beta-carotene and other vitamins and minerals.
Your body can produce antioxidant elements on its own, but you can also obtain antioxidant properties mainly from foods that you eat such as berries, broccoli, kale, lemon, orange, avocado, cucumber, nuts, meat, seafood, peaches and lots more. These can then also have an impact on your skin.
How Do Antioxidants Help The Skin?
Antioxidants can help repair your skin and smoothen out premature wrinkles while also moisturizing the skin and preventing the harsh impact of UV light from the sun.
You can either obtain these antioxidant benefits either by simply consuming food rich in these properties or by applying natural and organic face masks, serums or cream directly to your skin.
How exactly the antioxidants can help your skin is something you can understand in further detail through the following points.
Skin Repair
Our skin can often undergo some or the other kind of damage, although it is capable of carrying out repair so that new and nourished skin and grow back in place of the damaged skin.
Skin damage could be of various kinds, including burns, dryness, peeling, redness, inflammation and swelling. This kind of damage can sometimes interfere with the natural repair and renewal system that the skin usually follows, which is why antioxidants can help here.
By reducing the level of damage by empowering the cells and reducing inflammation, they can enable your skin to carry out repairs effectively. They can also enhance the creation of collagen which can then protect your skin.
Minimizing Premature Aging
Collagens can generally help quite a bit when it comes to protecting your skin, part of which can include maintaining the condition of your skin so that it does not begin to age too much and too soon.
This kind of premature aging, however, can still take place due to the effect of the free radicals since they can reduce the ability of collagens to function normally. Since your skin is particularly exposed to external free radicals, it might end up taking in more damage.
In this case, then, if there are antioxidants that can neutralize these free radicals and allow your skin to prevent wrinkling, lines, looseness, acne and more before their time.
Natural and healthy aging, however, will still continue to take place in its own time.
Preventing UV Damage
The ultraviolet (UV) rays of the sun can be quite harsh for our bodies to manage beyond a certain point. With increasing risk factors such as pollution and climate emergency, the exposure to UV rays has also been increasing considerably.
Too much exposure can lead to damage to the skin such as wrinkles, loose skin, sunburn, folds, spotting, pigmentation and, in an extreme case, skin cancer. This is mainly due to the inflammation and skin cell damage brought about by free radicals present in the environment.
However, due to antioxidant properties, the adverse effects of UV damage can reduce, especially since these properties have anti-inflammatory capabilities.
Soothing Impact
It is clear by now that the presence of free radicals can increase the levels of inflammation in various parts of the body, including the skin. This kind of inflammation, swelling, redness, burns and itchiness can result in pain and uncomfortable heat on the skin, which can be quite frustrating to deal with.
Since antioxidants can reduce inflammation and reduce the levels of pain that your skin might feel, they can create a calming sensation and have a soothing impact on your skin.
This is usually why your skin tends to feel calmer and cooler after you place cucumber slices on parts of your face for a few minutes.
Reducing Pigmentation
The harsh rays of the sun along with the free radicals present in the environment can pierce your skin and alter the natural melanin content in the body, no matter what your natural skin tone might be.
This kind of change caused to the natural structure of melanin can then result in spotting and pigmentation on the skin, causing some parts to have a lighter or darker color as compared to the rest of your skin.
Through antioxidants, you can prevent this kind of blotchiness and pigmentation to a considerable extent, especially since they can also reduce the excess level of tyrosinase which usually considerably increases the production of melanin.
Moisturizing Impact
Antioxidants can help prevent or reduce dryness in the skin due to their action on free radicals. This can then help your skin regain its natural healing properties while also giving it plenty of nourishment.
In addition to the essential skin nutrients, antioxidants can also allow your skin to maintain and keep the required levels of moisture so that it can then prevent too much dryness.
This can, therefore, have a moisturizing impact on your skin, which is why plenty of skincare products have antioxidant properties through the presence of vitamins C and E.
Which Antioxidants Can Help The Skin?
There are several vitamins, minerals and other such nutrients that contain antioxidant properties. However, not all of them might necessarily help your skin since some of them are bound to have different effects.
In this case, there are a few antioxidants that can particularly work better for helping and maintaining the health and condition of your skin. You can either obtain these from natural food sources or through direct application of skincare products or natural face masks.
For instance, vitamin C, vitamin E, vitamin B3, vitamin A, polyphenols, ferulic acid, coenzyme Q10 and curcumin, among many others, can help improve the condition of your skin while also preventing or reducing damage.
How you choose to take in antioxidants can depend on your requirements. However, incorporating foods rich in antioxidant properties can be the best and most natural solution, although you can also combine this with skincare and dermatological products.
Making your own face masks or buying natural oils and organic masks, creams and serums can help. Examples include vitamin C serums, honey, essential oils, avocado paste, turmeric paste, cucumber slices and green tea.
Keep your considerations and requirements in mind and opt for products that contain several antioxidants instead of just one. You should avoid taking antioxidant supplements due to the lack of supportive evidence about their effectiveness.
Are Antioxidants Always Effective?
There is, unfortunately, no guarantee that antioxidants will always be effective in helping your skin heal. This is mainly because antioxidants might behave differently depending on the kind of skin you have and what you are exposed to.
Antioxidants are also a bit weak, meaning that they are not immune to changes, damage and degradation. It is also important to account for how you deliver antioxidants to your skin or body.
Thus, while there is no guarantee of the effectiveness of antioxidants, they might certainly help destroy some free radicals and equip and strengthen your cells to fight damage on their own.
How Do Antioxidants Help the Skin? Summing Up
Antioxidants can help the skin in several ways by fighting against the free radicals present in the body. This can have various benefits to your skin, although the extent and kind of benefit can depend on the delivery method and your skin condition.
