What Ingredients Should I Look for in an Anti-Wrinkle Product?

As we get older, our skin loses its wonderful soft elastic texture and start to get a little drier and a little tougher. Eventually, that shows up in our faces as lines, creases and wrinkles. To keep ourselves looking younger, we often turn to a host of anti-wrinkle products to smooth things out. With so many options, which ingredients are the most important in an effective anti-aging treatment?

Matrikines

Let’s start with one of the latest compounds that are the newest addition to the anti-wrinkle world, matrikines. This is the main ingredient in products like matrixyl skin cream, and these are very new compounds that can help with cellular healing and growth. Healthy skin is more elastic, and won’t form creases or wrinkles. Look for more products with matrikines in the future.

Antioxidants

This really represents a whole range of potential ingredients, because you can find antioxidants in a large number of natural sources and most products want to utilize something different to stand out from others. Specific ingredients like like a variety of plant, flower or seed extracts and most vitamins (like C,A, several Bs and more) are all added for their antioxidant powers. The famous cosmetic compound retinol is a form of vitamin A, and also used for the same reasons.

What do they do? Specifically, antioxidants as a group will help clean up free radicals in your system, which are damaging particles that are created when you’re exposed to UV light and many kinds of environmental toxins.

Coenzyme Q10

In many ways, this is just another kind of antioxidant but coenzyme Q10 bears mentioning on its own. Not only does is mop up the free radical particles that damage your cells like the other antioxidants, it also offers a big boost to cell metabolism which gives your cells more energy to renew themselves and heal.

Hydroxy Acids

Hydroxy acids may sound a little similar to antioxidants but they play a different role in good anti-wrinkle products. These ingredients are basically exfoliants, and are intended to help clear away that top layer of dead skin that is giving you a dull complexion. By letting the fresher skin underneath come forward, you get a brighter look and the softer skin shows wrinkles less.

Peptides

Another branch in the cosmetic chemical family, representing many kinds of small protein building-blocks. A good cream should include peptides to speed up healing in your skin, which leads to less visible damage.

With so many products on the market, it’s impossible to say which ones have the best combination of these ingredients. Ideally, a good anti-wrinkle cream will have a sizable dose of them all to really be the most effective, but you definitely want to stay away from any products that claim to erase wrinkles without any of these.

And don’t forget that research is always ongoing when it comes to new cosmetic compounds, and there can be new and exciting ingredients that help with wrinkles on the horizon.