Men are increasingly facing up to skin care.
With countless hours in the gym, expensive supplements, crazy diets, brand-name clothing, trendy hairstyles or choosing expensive automobiles, men spend a tremendous amount of time, money and energy trying to look and feel younger. And while you can have all that going for you, if you neglect what is perhaps the No. 1 visible sign of aging, your face, it will be impossible to hide the effects of Father Time.
Face It
What you present each day -- your face -- is literally a window for the world to peer into, and it could reveal how well you care for your skin.
Everything shows up on the skin. The skin is a direct reflection of what is going on internally.While you can't fool Mother Nature, you can misdirect people into thinking you are younger. This means taking stock of the adverse effects you can avoid, and better understanding those you can't.
Genetic predisposition certainly plays a role. But for most men, slowing down the aging process is partly under their control because of lifestyle choices.
Among the detrimental things that men can control are poor diets, smoking, alcohol, stress and even sleeping positions. All of those play on your skin, as do facial exercises.
Apparently those goofy contortions are not the pushups for the face they are purported to be. So, your mother was partly right: Make a weird face often enough, and it might stay that way. Sort of.
As for lifestyle choices, alcohol is known to dry out your skin,
Smoking is another culprit -- no big surprise there -- as it prevents oxygen from easily getting to your skin, making your face look dull and lifeless.
And that advice from your acne-ridden teenage years -- to not eat certain foods because they might affect your skin? That still holds. Speeding up the aging process is caused by the breaking down of DNA and some of that can be attributed to a diet with lots of greasy and highly processed foods.
Stress also shows on a man's face.
Stress plays a major role with the face, Deep frown lines over time, clenching their jaws or grinding their teeth time and again without realizing it -- a huge benefit of getting a facial is the incredible amount of tension relief you get. Scalp and neck massage, forehead and eyebrow massage are very effective. Stimulating the areas of the face from the scalp down to the shoulders can be very productive in reducing stress and improving circulation.
Wear a Hat
Everything, though, pales before your skin's No. 1 enemy: the sun.
The absolute leading thing that speeds up the aging of the skin more than any other things combined is exposure to sun, If you took identical twins, sending one to live in the North Pole and one to live at the equator, all things being equal, at a given point the one living more in the sun will have more of the features associated with aged skin than the one dwelling in the colder climes.
Since relocating may not be option, we have to try to mitigate the effects of the sun with several smaller moves. This includes wearing quality sunglasses, limiting exposure to the sun at its peak hours, nightly application of a moisturizer, and, most of all, regular use of good sunscreen.
Men should make it a habit to use quality sunscreen. Some of the older brands haven’t really kept up technologically and so you want to make sure you apply broad spectrum sunscreen, blocking UVA and UVB light, There are not a lot of good ones out there that are approved by the FDA. I recommend Aveda and Neutrogena as effective examples, easily available and not really expensive.
The quest for youth is not a new notion, but if you want to save face, start with a sunscreen, moisturizer and rethink some of your habits. This trend for guys seems to be catching on as skin care professionals and product manufacturers have acknowledged a large upswing in their business is coming primarily from the male market.
Men are taking better care of their skin for a variety of reasons, but anti-aging regarding the face has become more about health and less about narcissism.
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