You know the drill: Wear sunscreen, eat well, exercise regularly, repeat. But the fact of the matter is, despite your healthiest habits, aging is inevitable. That doesn’t mean, however, that you’re stuck having to look less than your best. The more you know about how and why your skin and face change, the better equipped you are to take charge and age beautifully.
It turns out, looking young isn’t subjective—there’s a real science behind ageing – and it starts with understanding that the aging process is not one thing. There are actually three separate processes that combine to make our faces appear aged, and it is the combination of these three things that we think of when we see age on someone’s face.
The Three Parts of the Ageing Process Are…..
1. Lines caused by muscle movement
2. Volume Loss
3. Skin Changes
Knowing that – how do you pick the best treatments for your face? First, you decide which of those three things you want to correct, and then pick a treatment that works for that category. Sound complicated? It’s not! In this post we’ll talk about Lines Caused by Muscle Movement. Read The Secrets to Looking Amazing at Any Age: Part II and The Secrets to Looking Amazing at Any Age: Part III to learn about the rest of the aging process.
Lines Caused by Muscle Movement: The Problem
Do you have lines between your brows that make you look angry all the time? Lines around the corners of your eyes? Lines across your forehead? If you are over 35, odds are the answers to these questions is “yes”. All of these lines fall under the first part of the aging process – dynamic wrinkles. These are wrinkles that are caused by muscles pulling at the skin when we make expressions. Skin is very elastic because it is full of collagen. But, like anything stretchy, if you pull on it too many times, it starts to loose it’s “snap”. Every time we make an expression, our muscles pull on our skin, over time this breaks down our collagen, and our skin loses its ability to spring back to it’s normal, smooth shape. When this happens, and our expression lines become “etched” into our skin.
Almost all of the aging of the upper face (from the corners of our eyes to our hairline) is caused by our muscle movement breaking down our skin. The good news? It is both preventable and treatable! Since the cause of this aging is muscles pulling on the skin, when we relax those muscles, we can take away your lines, and also prevent new lines from forming. What do we use for this? Botox of course! Botox is a medication that relaxes the muscles where it is injected, and allows us to both treat and prevent dynamic again in the upper face. No wonder it has become a household name!
Lines Caused by Muscle Movement: The Solution
If you want to work on the lines in your upper face – the “11’s” between your eyebrows, the horizontal “worry lines” across your forehead, or the “crows feet” around your eyes – you need to pick a treatment which acts on the muscles. There are several of these –Botox is the best known – but they all act in the same way. Whether you are using Botox, or its cousins Dysport or Xeomin you are getting the same active ingredient – Botulinum Toxin A – which will do the same job of relaxing the muscles and smoothing the lines in the upper face away.
So in conclusion – keeping age at bay is simple, and follows some simple rules. In this post we covered – Lines Caused by Muscle Movement. Read The Secrets to Looking Amazing at Any Age: Part II and The Secrets to Looking Amazing at Any Age: Part III to learn about the rest of the aging process.. And remember to follow these basic rules: to keep looking your best you need…
• Muscle control for your upper face – Botox being most common
• Volume for your lower face – either through replacing or rebuilding your lost structure.
• Skin treatments to regenerate your lost collagen – resurfacing Lasers, microneedling and PRP
• Skin treatments to remove any brown and red spots –IPL lasers and good topical home care
Want to learn more?
