What Do Your Hormones Have to Do With Your Skin’s Appearance? Plenty

Growing up is tough on skin. Not including the influence of genetics, there are two major types of skin aging — internal and external. Historically, most skincare has been designed to work against external aging caused by UV radiation and pollution. 

What often goes ignored is internal aging, or hormone decline, which informs our external aging. Our sex hormones — estrogen, progesterone, et al. — play a major role in biological functions other than our libidos, including skin cell synthesis. Lower hormone levels mean fewer skin cells and lower amounts of essential nutrients, which leads to dryness, bigger pores, eye sag, eye circles, crow’s feet, forehead lines, the “elevens” between your brows, thinning hair, and increased skin sensitivity.

How do hormone changes affect skin?

When women and men reach 29 or 30, their hormone production and corresponding skin cell production start to diminish by about 1 percent each year. This process starts as invisible, and most skin will “bounce back” if they laugh, look annoyed, frown, and laugh again well into their late 30s.

But at around 39 or 40, the pace of hormone change diverges dramatically. For men, it carries on at about 1 percent per year. But for many women, hormone production loss doubles when they enter perimenopause — the 4-10 year period before menopause itself —  causing skin cell generation to decrease by 2-2.5 percent annually.

After a year without periods — which, for many women, is around age 51 — the proverbial other shoe drops. Those period-less 12 months are the transition into menopause’s final stage, postmenopause, when the ovaries have largely stopped producing estrogen. Women are hit with a 30 percent drop in their skin production capacity, which is equivalent to the total cumulative loss that started back at age 30. Skin layers are fundamentally less hydrated, strong, full, and elastic. Expression lines no longer snap back, wrinkles are born, and women’s skincare needs to do some heavy lifting, working from the outside in.

How does skincare help?

We often ask what ingredients to look for in our skincare, but that doesn’t cover the larger question of purpose. As we age, we should be thinking first and foremost about the purpose of a skincare product, then what the best ingredients are for that purpose, and finally, what formulation can maximize the ingredients’ effectiveness. It’s the same way that the same food ingredients can yield entirely different tastes with different preparations. Finding out what you want to address, learning what skincare ingredients are best for that, and then finding what formulations are most effective is the way you want to go.

For external photo-aging, we seek out sun care and makeup that incorporates SPF. For aging caused by estrogen depletion, we need skincare that counteracts the loss in collagen, elastin, and hyaluronic acid, along with the increase in skin sensitivity and redness or acne that hormone loss causes. Your skincare should work to regenerate or directly add collagen and hyaluronic acid to your skin, and it should be working beneath the skin barrier whenever possible: Even the best ingredients cannot be effective if they’re just sitting on the surface. The key is finding skincare that will penetrate your skin to work from the inside out — remember that internal aging informs external. Here are some ingredients to look out for depending on what skin concerns you want to address.

Low-weight hyaluronic acid (HA)

Oddly, hyaluronic acid isn’t an acid at all but instead, a long-chain polysaccharide (sugar) molecule that can hold 1000 times its weight in water. This good-for-you, must-have sugar is a key component of our extracellular matrix, the jello-like substance that holds cells in place, and it’s what makes skin feel firm and “bouncy.”

Peptides

Another super ingredient category is signaling peptides, which are designed to trigger collagen or hyaluronic acid creation in the skin and can make up for lost estrogenic action, or internal aging. But since peptides are chains of amino acids, they’re often too large to get past the skin barrier instantly and need time to do so. To see the benefits of peptides in your skincare, make sure you’re using them in the form of serums or creams, which stay on your skin long enough to soak in.

Fruit Enzymes

As our skin cell production decreases, our skin cell turnover — or desquamation — slows as well. Normally, our skin sheds old cells all day every day, which encourages fresh cells to come to the surface and prevents skin from looking dull. When the natural process slows, exfoliation helps to jumpstart our skin’s revitalization.

But here’s the rub (bad pun intended!): We need to exfoliate and increase cellular turnover gently. Facial scrubs with tiny beads or kernels create micro-tears in your skin and only serve to make it weaker. Fruit enzymes, on the other hand, prompt cellular turnover and reveal a fresh glow when used in cleansers, toners, and masks.

Vitamin C + Niacinamide: Antioxidants

You’ve probably heard that free radicals are bad news, but what does that mean? Free radicals are molecules that are missing electrons, which makes them chemically unstable. To stabilize themselves, free radicals will poach electrons from neighboring molecules, which in turn makes those molecules unstable and causes a chain reaction of electron theft called oxidation. 

Oxidation damages cellular DNA and mitochondria causes collagen and elastin breakdown and prevents skin from performing basic cell repair. A simple way to visualize the process is with apple slices: They turn brown when exposed to air, but squeezing lemon juice on them prevents that oxidation from occurring. That’s because lemon juice is rich in vitamin C, an antioxidant that has extra electrons that free radicals can use to stabilize themselves without stealing from stable molecules.

While free radicals can develop naturally in our bodies, much of the oxidative stress we experience comes from external free radicals such as pollution, smoking, UV radiation, artificial dyes, and exposure to other toxins. Our bodies aren’t totally defenseless: We produce antioxidants internally, but it’s nearly impossible to produce enough to contend with the increasing number of free radicals in modern life. As a result, vitamin C and other antioxidants like vitamins A and E have become increasingly popular in skincare.

Unfortunately, vitamin C (L-ascorbic acid or ascorbyl palmitate) is a tricky ingredient. It needs to be used at a high concentration (preferably at least 12 percent) to be effective but is itself unstable and breaks down with exposure to air, heat, or light. Vitamin C-based skincare should be used up within three to four months of opening, so don’t try to ration out your skincare to extend its life.

Algae  

Algae carry a high percentage of stable antioxidants and are rich in vitamins, minerals, lipids, and proteins. They’re particularly good for mature skin as they provide anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, and hydration properties all in one.

Every woman should have the right to look and feel her best self at every age. As long as your skincare and makeup practices change and grow with you throughout your life stages, your skin clock doesn’t need to be tethered to a calendar. New lifestyle brands and educational programs, often led by women, recognize that internal aging is as addressable as external aging, and modern formulations can help your skin look and feel its smoothest, strongest, and most supple self. So buy the skincare and makeup that works for you, take care of your body, wear whatever you want, and ignore articles telling you what to wear by the decade. That’s the anti-ageism attitude in a nutshell. 

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Celeste Lee and Lorrie King are beauty industry veterans in midlife. They founded Caire Beauty, Skincare for Grown-Up Women, when they found out personally that skincare addressing estrogen-related aging simply did not exist. 

A version of this article previously appeared on ourkindra.com.