With my low-maintenance skin, I wondered how I could take care of it and keep it healthy. I thought I was doing a good job so far, but there’s always room for improvement, right? So here are a couple of things I learned.
1. Sunscreen is key: It’s not surprising that the number one thing you can do to maintain healthy skin is sun protection—using sunscreen on the regular, wearing protective clothing and accessories, and staying in the shade. Robinson explains that sunlight contains a mixture of different lights, which are UV rays, visible light, and infrared light.
“When UVB rays pass through the epidermis, it can travel through the cell to the DNA and cause damaging breaks in our strands,” she says. Some of these breaks can be healed by our skin’s natural repair mechanisms, but as damage accumulates over time, this can place us at risk of harmful skin changes and even skin cancers. UVA rays also penetrate the skin, but they travel deeper into the dermis, which contains all of our scaffolding structures like collagen and elastin. Through increased oxidative stress and free radical production, this form of radiation can lead to changes in our collagen and DNA that eventually show up visibly on the skin as fine lines, wrinkles, discoloration, sun spots, and loss of elasticity and firmness.”
