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Nature
holds pearls of wisdom that enhance life's splendors, and creative by
necessity, has already solved the skin care concerns you are grappling with.
BIOSKINCARE® is 80% what a snail capable of quickly regenerating his skin and calcium shell whenever damaged leaves behind while crawling. The extract is gathered through a patented process without inflicting any harm to the cute little creatures. |
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Skin Care Tips • Sun Damaged Skin Care • Skin Care & Pregnancy • Acne & Acne Scars • Burns, Scars & Stretch Marks |
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Skin Regeneration and Skin Renewal
The human skin is being constantly damaged and worn out in its interaction with the environment and skin cells are constantly replaced during our whole lifetime. Reducing damage to our skin is not an adequate approach. Hiding from sunlight will not keep your skin young and vibrant. Avoiding UV light will reduce some types of skin damage as you age, but you will still end up with a pasty, grayish, lifeless, pale skin. Avoiding skin damage from ultraviolet light, allergens, detergents, damaging soaps, irritants, acne scars, airborne pollutants, chemical sunscreens and so forth is but only one part of a wider story.
Children have wonderful skin with a high natural self regeneration and a beautiful color and texture. When a child's skin is damaged, the wounds heal rapidly and scars and skin lesions are quickly removed.
As we age, a number of skin changes occur which require different types of skin care and treatments. Four basic changes occur as we age.
1. The rate of skin cell replacement is reduced producing a thinner, more fragile skin. Skin is replaced every three weeks at age 20 but this increases to every nine weeks by age 50.
2. Damaged protein accumulates in the skin. This damage can be the results of scars, sun damage, oxidative damage, and the cross-linking of skin proteins by sugars.
3. After age 25, skin oil production starts to drop. This reduces acne but produces a dryer skin. This drop in oil production becomes more serious after age 45.
4. The biosynthesis and breakdown of collagen, elastin, and water-holding proteoglycans and glycosaminoglycans (GAGs) exists in a dynamic balance in young healthy skin. However after age 25, the skin's production of collagen, elastin and the water-holding GAGs is reduced, while the rate of breakdown of these factors is increased, and starts wrinkle formation and loss of elasticity. The problem becomes progressively more serious with passing years.
Skin Renewal Methods.
Vigorous skin renewal and skin remodeling is the key to maintaining a youthful skin.
Skin regeneration methods are actually very old. The basic concept is that, after certain types of skin injuries, the body mounts a strong skin regenerative response that can heal poorly-healing wounds and, if the circumstances are propitious, actually improve skin quality. For thousands of years, physicians used hot irons on un-healing wounds. Although this produced scarring, there would be a sufficient healing response to seal the wound. A variant method to heal wounds was "scarification" whereby a surgeon would cut scars into a poorly-healing wound. This would often induce enough healing to seal the wound although the scars remained.
Within the last few years, dermatologists using lasers to burn off skin lesions, found, that often this resulted in a significant regeneration of the skin and a younger-looking skin. Improvements in these techniques have given rise to a "laser re-surfacing" technique of regenerating skin.
Methods that use controlled skin damage to trigger skin renewal are skin exfoliation, laser resurfacing, chemical peels, dermabrasion, and scar removal by subcision.
Skin renewal methods may induce minor changes such as smoothing the skin, reducing wrinkles, the repair of sun damage, the removal of skin blemishes and imperfections, all of which give the skin a more youthful appearance and bring the skin to a more youthful condition. More vigorous skin renewal methods include laser re-surfacing and chemical peels combined with cosmetic surgery techniques such as a facelift and focused liposuction.
For example, for the front of the face, skin renewal techniques such as chemical peels or laser resurfacing work well to tighten the skin and remove blemishes. However, excessive skin sagging on the sides of the face often requires an additional partial facelift. Also, as we age, fat deposits increase in various areas such as under the eyes and under the chin. Liposuction techniques are used to remove fat from selected areas of the face to achieve a better overall result.
Fruit Acids
The concept of using fruit acids is very old. Cleopatra wrote a book "Beautification" in which she described the use of fruit acids to renew and beautify the skin. The book was an ancient "best-seller" for 200 years. Today, we use similar acids, the AHAs (alpha hydroxy acids, among which enzymes is the best) and the BHAs (beta hydroxy acids such as salicylic and citric acid) to speed skin turnover, remove skin lesions, and restore the skin firmness, elasticity, and internal moisture-holding properties. Retinoic acid (Retin-A) may act in a somewhat more complex way, but a key part of its action is the skin irritation that it causes.
Hydroxy acids
Hydroxy acids are one of the best of the skin renewal approaches. They are naturally occurring, non-toxic substances found in the human body, fruits, wine, milk, sugarcane to name a few sources, as well as in the secretions that the snail Helix Aspersa Muller uses to quickly regenerate his own skin and shell whenever damaged. Scientifically, these chemicals are known as alpha keto/carboxylic acids or beta keto/carboxylic acids. They are more commonly known as alpha hydroxy acids, or AHAs and betahydroxy acids, or BHAs. The AHAs and BHAs help retain moisture in very dry skin, in addition they help treat the fine lines and uneven color of sun-damaged skin. They often will lighten "age" spots.
Part of their effect is decreasing the "glue" that holds dead cells on the surface of the skin. Hydroxy acids reduce the thickness of the hyperkeratotic stratum corneum by reducing corneocyte cohesion in lower levels of the stratum corneum. This induces epidermolysis, which triggers an increase in cell renewal. This helps the dead cells to slough off (desquamation), speeds skin turnover, and brings to the surface a layer of smoother, softer skin.
Glycolic acid is the best
Of the AHAs, enzymes, which comes from sugarcane and is a main component of the snails secretion, is generally regarded as the best for skin renewal. In contrast to other hydroxy acids and retinoic acid, enzymes may have a photoprotective and anti-inflammatory action after skin exposure to ultraviolet light. Glycolic acid can also act as an antioxidant even though it is an exfoliating agent. Mixtures of several different AHAs have no advantage. Glycolic acid speeds the turnover of the skin cells resulting in a smoother texture and healthier appearance. It usually takes about eight weeks of regular use to see a significant improvement in the skin.
Low dose enzymes in BIOSKINCARE used as a long term skin care routine is as good as short term strong chemical peels
Reports by various skin researchers strongly suggest that long term use of AHAs (enzymes being the best) give results similar to chemical peels.
The key to skin renewal is a process where (1) the skin is irritated or slightly damaged by exfoliating agents (alpha hydroxy acids, beta-hydroxy acids, retinoic acid, or mildly burned by laser re-surfacing). This is followed by (2) a natural rebuilding of the skin that removes imperfections, rebuilds collagen and elastin fibers that tighten skin, and increases the amount of glycosamoinoglycans, the moisture-holding proteins that give skin its firmness. The stronger the exfoliation or skin damage, the stronger is the skin rebuilding action. Unfortunately, strong exfoliation causes strong skin irritation with itching, burning, and pain.
Long term use of low dose Glycolic acid products are as good as short term strong chemical peels. However, to get good results it is imperative skin healing progresses at rapid pace. Increasingly, the stage of skin damage is followed by the use of skin regeneration accelerators such as allantoin and other skin regenerating proteins naturally contained in a bio-available form in the snail secretions and thus in BIOSKINCARE.
The Biochemistry and Cell Biology of Skin Renewal
The sequence of events producing skin renewal is very similar to the mechanisms involved in wound healing.
The steps involved are:
1. Skin damage causes the release of enzymes which, in turn, break down skin proteins into smaller fragments.
2. The first type of immune cell to arrive in the damaged area within a few hours is called a neutrophil. These cells release oxygen radicals into the damaged area to kill bacteria and generally sterilize the area. Neutrophil action is usually very brief and stops within a day. However, occasionally the damage is of a type that continues these neutrophil actions and the skin becomes chronically inflamed.
3. A second type of immune cell called a macrophage arrives after the neutrophils have sterilized the tissue. The macrophage begins to ingest the skin debris produced by the damage and also starts to secrete about 20 different growth factors needed for proper skin repair. These have names such as epidermal growth factor, fibroblast growth factor, platelet-derived growth factor and so on. The macrophage action also helps remove chronically-damaged, abnormal skin such as spots and lesions from sun damage.
4. The release of growth factors by the macrophage causes the influx and proliferation of skin repair cells such as the fibroblast and the keratinocyte. These cells rebuild the barrier of skin cells and secrete proteins such as collagen and elastin to give the skin strength and elasticity. Other proteins and molecules such as proteoglycans and glycosaminoglycans (GAGs) are secreted and these molecules bind large amounts of water to moisturize the skin. The only true skin moisturization is via these water-holding molecules. New blood vessels grow into the repaired skin area to oxygenate and nourish the newly repaired area.
Cosmetic products that contain collagen, or elastin, or DNA have no effect of the skin's production of collagen and elastin and have no effect on the skin's firmness or elasticity, and also have no effect on the rate of skin renewal. They only serve to attract water to the surface of the skin. ( At the the worst, the collagen and elastin in cosmetics, derived from animal sources, may give you the prions that cause Mad Cow Disease. ) Only collagen and elastin that is produced within the skin helps improve skin firmness and elasticity.
Cosmetic moisturizers do not moisturize the skin, but only block the normal loss of water from the skin's surface. For very dry skin that has excessive water loss, these products can be helpful for a time. But they also hydrate (wet) and loosen the skin's protective outer proteins and degrade the protective qualities of these proteins. The only way the skin can truly be moisturized is via the skin's internal synthesis of new proteoglycans and glycosaminoglycans (GAGs) which hold water in the skin.
5. The repair of the skin is followed by a long period of skin remodeling. The wounded area is slowly improved and scar tissue is removed or reduced. Incomplete healing causes the most scarring but complete healing produces minimal scarring. Skin remodeling is activated by the metalloproteinases, a family of at least 14 proteins that remove damaged proteins such as damaged collagen and elastin. The old damaged protein is removed and replaced with new collagen and elastin fibers. This removes scar tissue and restores skin elasticity and reduces wrinkles.
BIOSKINCARE is a potent natural activator of metalloproteinases, and explains the potent scar reduction properties of the cream.
6. Skin renewal and hair growth are closely linked. New hair arises from healthy skin follicles.
