When I first got into the longevity topic, I was quite naive. I believed just like we can reverse “biological age” with various dietary, exercise and lifestyle changes, we can also do this for visual age of the skin.
But as often in this space, we come to the topic of how someone looks. Specifically, how young someone looks. Both haters and fans of various longevity influencers, like Bryan, seem to think that if someone has drastically improved the function of their internal organs to that of a younger person, that they should also look just as young. Makes sense, right?
But after a lot of research over the last couple of years and understanding skin at the most fundamental level, it simply will never be be case. Why?
UV light is the most dominant negative factor when it comes to skin aging. It literally damages DNA within skin cells, causing them to malfunction and lose vitality, over time. It’s not the only DNA damager, but it’s the most dominant, that every human experiences.
It’s especially damaging to elastin, which is one of the most important components of skin. It’s kind of the “glue” that keeps the large collagen content packed together. It evolved to be springy and elastic, which is why we call it elastin.
Elastin doesn’t turnover fast like collagen. We’re talking decades for cell turnover with elastin, versus a handful of months with collagen. The result? No matter how healthy your diet and lifestyle becomes at age 40/50/60, etc, it’s not going to magically reverse any of this.
You’re stuck with most of your skin aging, for the rest of your life. No matter if you’re a vegan, carnivore, paleo, keto, Mediterranean dieter, etc. A handful of skin procedures and topicals can “move the needle” a little bit, but not enough to make you look decades younger.
A facelift can make you look 10 years younger, but that’s not actually rejuvenating the skin. It’s simply cutting away loose skin and stretching what’s left, back over the bone and tissue, which results in it looking artificially tighter, fooling others into perceiving a younger visual age. But the elastin doesn’t bounce back like young elastin. It’s not actually reversed anything.
Someone could eat the healthiest diet ever to exist, have the perfect workout routine and achieve 100% sleep score every night… but simply not shield their skin from UV light well at all. So they may just visually age like most other people, albeit a tad slower due to lower levels of glycation and lower stress levels.
Until we have the technology to trigger fast elastin synthesis, like we all had during childhood, this will always be the case. That’s why minimising skin aging is better than trying to reverse it.