Health x Wellness
5 Ways to Delay Neck Aging
You have your daily skin care routine for your face down to a science and you never leave your house without your sunscreen and moisturizer. Unfortunately, not many people pay equal attention to their necks.
The neck often starts to look older even before your eye wrinkles appear. This is because the neck skin is much thinner than the facial skin but is exposed to the same wear and tear every day. Over time, the skin loses collagen and elastin. Combined with environmental factors such as sun damage and smoking, neck skin typically ages quicker than facial skin.
Fortunately, there are ways to prevent neck aging.
Protection from the sun
If you are too busy to care about any skin care for your neck, use sunscreen at least. UV rays from the sun cause major damage to your skin and accelerate skin aging significantly. It increases skin pigmentation, wrinkles, and skin DNA damage, while reducing skin elasticity.
The single best thing you can do to maintain a youthful neck is to wear sunscreen with SPF of at least 30, whether you are spending the day indoors or outdoors. Avoid unnecessary prolonged or excessive exposure to the sun.
Quality skin care
Is it necessary to use a dedicated “neck cream”? No. Neck creams are usually as good as your face moisturizer and they do not offer additional benefits unless they contain retinoids.
A general rule of thumb is, whatever skin care products you apply on your face can often be applied on your neck. Take care of your neck skin just like how you would take care of your facial skin.
Retinoids, an ingredient that includes retinol, retinyl palmitate, and retinoic acid, can help repair skin damage caused by UV rays. Adding a retinoid to neck skin care helps reduce neck wrinkles, improves skin texture and skin tone. It helps accelerate skin cell turnover, improves collagen production in the skin, and reduces skin pigmentation.
Healthy lifestyle
A well balanced diet and regular exercise improve your overall health, and also improve your skin quality and delay skin aging. Avoid consuming a diet high in carbohydrates and fats. Keep your body well hydrated throughout the day. Regular exercise improves blood circulation, which provides essential nutrients to the skin effectively.
Avoid smoking and excessive alcohol. Recreational drug use, which is illegal, is also known to accelerate skin aging.
Dump bad habits
Did you know that constantly looking at your cell phone can accelerate the formation of horizontal neck wrinkles and make your neck look older? We often hold our cell phone lower than the eye level thereby bending our neck downwards and creating neck wrinkles. Over time, these wrinkles may become deep permanent horizontal lines. Just like a piece of paper, when folded, can form permanent creases.
Overuse of perfume on the neck can also age your neck skin. Perfume often contains alcohol and aromatizers that dry your skin quickly. Dry skin is more prone to aging and wrinkles formation. Avoid daily usage of perfume on your neck. Keep your neck skin moisturised at all times.
Collagen!
Collagen is a natural protein present in our body especially in our skin structure. This structural protein fibers function to tighten our skin and allow the skin to bounce back easily after it is stretched. In other words, it keeps our skin youthful. But as we age, our skin collage starts to deplete gradually leading to skin ageing and sagging. Neck skin is an early victim due to its thickness (or lack of).
Skin care, oral supplement and treatment that induce collagen production or delays collagen depletion will be helpful in delaying neck skin ageing. This includes oral collagen supplements, topical collagen serum and medical cosmetic treatments that stimulate collagen production.
Sufficient rest and sleep
Do not underestimate the power of sleep. Skin repairing process is at its peak during a good night’s sleep. Your stress hormone level is at its lowest at night, allowing your body to rest and your skin to heal and repair.
Be sure to get sufficient sleep at night if you wish to keep your skin youthful.
Embrace technology
There is only so much we can do to delay neck skin aging. Often, advanced skin aging such as sagging skin can only be treated with the help of medical technologies. There are many non-surgical medical treatments that can improve neck skin.
Medical treatments such as ultrasound lifting and radio frequency tightening can help improve neck skin sagging and wrinkling. These treatments use controlled energy to heat up specific layers of the skin and boost the production of collagen and essential proteins. By doing so, they can produce skin lifting and tightening.
Laser treatments such as skin resurfacing laser and pigmentation laser may be useful in improving the neck skin texture, skin irregularities, fine lines, and pigmentation.
If you are comfortable with needles, skin hydration injection treatments such as hyaluronic acid injections can effectively provide intense hydration to the skin to improve skin elasticity and fine lines.
Do not neglect your neck. Take care of your neck skin just like you would with your facial skin. Age gracefully!
Article contributed by Dr Sii Sik Liong, S Aesthetics Clinic.
Dr Sii Sik Liong (徐旭隆) is the resident doctor at S Aesthetics Clinic, he graduated with a Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery from St George’s University of London. He also holds the postgraduate qualification of the Membership of the Royal College of Physicians (MRCP, UK). He is an experienced doctor in the field of Aesthetic Medicine. He is fully accredited in aesthetic procedures such as dermal fillers, Botox and laser treatment. He has attended numerous Aesthetic courses and conference around Asia, Europe and the UK, and has been actively involved in researches and studies, as well as education throughout his working years.
Dr Sii believes in consistence holistic and friendly approach to his patients has earned him numerous compliments throughout the years, and he will continue to improve to produce better care and treatment for his patients.
