For your skin to
look good and youthful you definitely need to provide it with the same
environment as the young skin that you are trying to emulate. Young skin has
an ample supply of all the materials needed to look healthy and one of the
more important of these is Vitamin C.
Vitamin C is needed to maintain the collagen "framework" that provides the
structural firmness of your skin to keep it supple and pliant. Without an
adequate supply of collagen normal facial expressions can make these
structures fail (like frowning or smiling) turning them into permanent,
eventually deeply etched, lines in the face.
Expose that same face to the sun and the
damage of UV radiation compounds the problem, ageing the skin long
before it needs to. The good news is
that Vitamin C (ascorbic acid) can help arrest this deterioration on both
fronts. On the one hand it is a major contributor to the production of
collagen (essential to rebuild and maintain the structural framework of the
skin) on the other it is also an excellent antioxidant for UVA and UVB protection
thereby reducing the ageing effect of UV radiation.
The bad news is that a glass of orange juice a day will not
help in the battle against the signs of ageing, in fact a gallon will not
even get there. By the time we begin to show
the first signs of wrinkles and ageing skin our skin has already lost the
priority war in our bodies.
To start the body only absorbs a limited
amount of Vitamin C - regardless of how much is ingested. The distribution
of this crucial vitamin is prioritized as follows: first to organs, teeth,
bones, cartilage and joints, then as a component in the creation of blood,
an antioxidant in the body and blood stream and then, if there is any left
over the skin (the largest organ of the body) gets a turn.
That is not where the bad news end because as we grow older
our vascular delivery system also deteriorates and over time the supply of
nutrients to the skin reduces gradually. So even if there is enough
Vitamin C it struggles to get to where it can do good to the skin.
The obvious solution is to apply Vitamin C topically by just
rubbing it in but even that has its problems. Firstly not all forms of
Vitamin C can be absorbed through the skin and the second problem is in the
stability of Vitamin C.
The good news is that once Vitamin C has been absorbed by the
skin it is unlikely to be lost before it has done its good work. It can't be
washed off and it is retained for two to three days in the skin, giving it
ample time to do maximize the localized benefit.
The fundamental problem with Vitamin C, available as
L-ascorbic acid in many preparations, is that it starts deteriorating almost
immediately and it takes a very short period of time before it totally loses
its efficacy. L-ascorbic acid has a shelf life of around two weeks before
losing as much as 50% of its potency and there is little evidence that
supports the theory that the deterioration only starts after it is opened.
That means that by the time you buy it it may deliver half, or possibly,
none of the promised benefit.
In an attempt to overcome this instability of pure Vitamin C,
esters of Vitamin C came under the limelight - the most popular being
Ascorbyl Palmitate (a salt of ascorbic acid).
Ascorbyl Palmitate is stable and can last for years. The
molecule can and will be absorbed by the skin and many believe that it is
even more effective than Vitamin C for both collagen production as well as a
free radical. There are also many that believe that the molecule, although
absorbed by the skin, will not release or allow the cells of the body to
benefit from the attached ascorbic acid, hence having no effect at all.
The development of the use of Vitamin C to prevent or even
combat ageing of the skin is in an early phase and it is inevitable that
sooner or later we will see a major breakthrough. In the meantime, if you
choose to buy and use preparations that contain vitamin c it may be prudent
to see if the supplier claims to have dealt with the problem of the
stability of the product or at least acknowledge that it is an issue by
providing a use-by date.* | 
