Some heavy lifting for the claim that skin impacts health comes from this:
> it's thought that intrinsic factors are responsible for the tiniest fraction of the classic "aged" look, while UV light is responsible for over 80% of visible skin changes.
Here's the result from the study this links to:
"By calculating statistical correlations between the four clinical clusters (wrinkles/texture, ptosis, vascular disorders, and pigmentation disorders), and real age and apparent age on the one hand and heliodermal status on the other hand, we identified a link between each clinical cluster and aging and the photoaging process. By comparing evaluations of clinical signs between the two groups for each 10-year cluster, we demonstrated that whatever the age, a prevalence of pigmentation disorders for the sun-seeking group (ie, pigmentation) is strongly linked to ultraviolet exposure. Meanwhile, clinical signs of ptosis are linked more to chronological aging and do not present differences between the two groups, nor, therefore, photoaging. Wrinkles and texture are affected by the two aging processes. Finally, clinical signs of vascular disorders present no evolution with age."
I guess since UV impacts pigmentation and partially wrinkles, they add that up to 80%, but I see no hard number given for % impact on wrinkles/texture.
One problem I can immediately see is that people are judged to be older primarily based on wrinkling, not pigmentation. Though it may be uncommon to notice age spots absent of significant wrinkling.
I don't see a convincing case that unprotected skin is correlated with mortality risk moreso than poor health is correlated with aged skin.
Smooth, soft and clear skin is definitely correlated with youth. It conjures the image of babies in most people's minds. Deviations from that indicate a degree of aging depending on the type and extent.
I’ve been applying DIY 20% ascorbic acid solution on my face for a few weeks, and am seeing some benefits already. Photoaging and spots seem to revert a bit, and there is definitely some lightening (as expected [1]). According to some Reddit posts, it takes a few months until the improved collagen synthesis becomes noticeable.
Vitamin C serums are quite expensive because ascorbic acid oxidizes quickly, and other forms have to be used instead. But if you mix ascorbic acid with distilled water yourself, every few days, you get a very cheap and probably more potent alternative. I put it in a sprayer bottle, keep it in the fridge, and spray my face in the morning. I haven’t found studies on the ideal concentration so far, but consensus on Reddit is that anything between 10 and 20% is ideal for collagen synthesis. 20% is too harsh for some.
what's more efficient is taking care of the skin from the inside (so with food - vegetable, outdoor activity, no sun cream needed, always good to protect the head though)
I think the presumption here is that they are white and reducing the look of dark spots and not someone with darker skin lightening it overall.
A challenge with skin-related literature (and internet comments) is that there's always the unspoken assumption that you're talking about a white person unless stated otherwise. Even the article reads oddly of you start off thinking of them as a dark skinned person.
Aging skin usually accumulates pigmentation abnormalities, like hyper- and hypopigmentation. Ascorbic acid might be able to help both. That’s not exclusive to Caucasian skin types btw.
In my case, I‘m just taking it as a sign that it’s working, as pigmentation is only one of the areas AA affects.
Folk history judges people by the quality of their skin (to the dismay of adolescents in particular). You see it in hollywood and in literature: the hero has clear skin while the villain is surprisingly often described as being disfigured. This could stem from a long practice of disease avoidance before modern medicine, even when no disease is relevant (a birthmark, recovered from smallpox, etc).
Years ago I worked in dermatology (pharma side) and I started out thinking that apart from skin cancers it was just about vanity. Wow, I could not have been more wrong! The point I started this comment with was pointed out to me. And because of that phenomenon, people with skin issues often do restrict their social activities because of it. In some extreme cases (say, fungal infections that you can't even catch from other people) they even become shut ins. Terrible.
Historically the notions of cleanliness and health are excpetionally strongly aligned with virtue, and filth, disease, ugliness, and disability with sin or evil. This appears across a large range of Eurasian cultures that I'm aware of, and quite probably even more widely elsewhere (though I'm less aware of those).
Even such attributes as handedness can be ascribed to virtue or sin, as with, well, sinister, literally, "of the left side", but with the evolved sense of "prompted by malice or ill-will". See: <https://www.etymonline.com/word/sinister>
(And apparently "sinister" and "sin" are not related, though that possibility had occurred to me whilst writing this.)
The same concept often extended to medicine and medical practice, and it wasn't until the emergence of germ theory of infectious disease that medical knowledge and practice began to emerge from its moralising of pathology to a general understanding of disease and dysfunction as being organic in nature. That shift is still incomplete, and there are places, institutions, individuals, and conditions in which moralisation remains a too-common occurance (obesity, addiction, sexually-transmitted diseases, and mental health most especially). We also see moralisation of pathology in other contexts, most notably in criminal law and politics.
It may be a primal aversion to illness and its manifestations because of a natural selection favoring the best and the fittest, as anything skewing from that could pose a danger to survival. Let me be clear that I do not justify any discrimination or prejudice but I also acknowledge that there are primal urges at play and it's from this point of view that I speak, not my human own.
There still comes a point at which the notion that there are physical (as in real-world, manifested, measurable and discoverable) causes to dysfunctions rather than metaphysical or spiritual ones (and I'm including such phenomena as behaviours, social dynamics, and psychology as "physical", inasmuch as they exist within and not beyond the physical world). At which time the concept of moralising pathologies itself seems to become a pathology, hindering rather than assisting in resolving those issues.
The primal aversion model works where such knowledge isn't present, and as that aversion is itself likely wired deeply within our genetics and psyche, it's not something easily banished. But it is advantageous in general to override that tendency, most especially if one's goal is to actually solve the underlying problem, as physical causes imply chains of causality and opportunities to influence outcomes.
gumby says >"I believe that the absurd “virgin” obsession in some cultures is an archaic holdover to try to avoid STDs."<
No shit, Sherlock!8-)) But to characterise this as an "absurd ...obsession" is wrongheaded.
Of course people don't want STDs!
STDs for the most part killed people (syphilis, HIV/AIDS, hepatitis B, et al). Only in the last century have we had antibiotics and only in the last 50 years antivirals. Were there a major war supplies of those drugs, along with the birth control pill, would dwindle or vanish.
STDs are a scourge b/c we have nothing to make them go away permanently. Maybe someday we will, but until then being a "virgin" has certain very real advantages.
> But to characterise this as an "absurd ...obsession" is wrongheaded...[STDs bad]
Of course they are but it’s archaic and thus absurd today when they can be avoided (ubiquitous condoms) and in most cases treated.
Not to mention I like to engage in activities with others with a modicum of skill…not like I seek out novice chess or tennis players. Without the STD risk the characteristic has no benefit.
There is always an STD risk, IIRC ~3% per year for condoms, which accumulates each year, always increasing, never decreasing.
So the probability that your condom does not fail in any year is 97%. The likelihood that your condoms don't fail for N years is (0.97)*N. Odds of "no failure" for 10 years is ~74% and for 20 years ~54%. Not so great. You're looking like a fuzzy STD taco -a high risk matchup with no gain. Your gambling friends seek out younger, safer partners. [And that's part of what they're doing, isn't it? After all, studs can calculate probabilities too.]
And that's just for condoms.
What you're describing is not "skill" but a peculiar form of addictive gambling.
And to top it off, there's always the "Lorena Bobbit" factor: a mate slices and dices b/c you gave him/her an STD.
no - because sex has a biological cost. Many mammals have a "heat" cycle where adults become sexually active, then it goes away. Then everyone can return to survival. It is arguable that only certain niche creatures with relatively easy lives, can afford to be sexual more than that.
> "Beauty equals good" is an age-old trope in entertainment, points out Doris Bazzini, a professor of social psychology at Appalachian State University. In a 1999 study she co-authored, a panel watched 20 of the top-grossing movies in each decade from 1940 to 1989, rating characters by attractiveness and other traits. They found that the stereotype held true across all decades and genres. She discovered the same thing in a 2010 study on human characters in 21 Disney animated movies.
> "Attractive characters displayed higher intelligence, lower aggressiveness and greater moral virtue," the study said. Even animal characters show similar patterns, Bazzini points out: The villain in "The Lion King" is literally named Scar and has one across his eye. "Evil as plain as the scar on his face," says one song in "The Lion King II."
“It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness. A handsome woman talks nonsense, you listen and hear not nonsense but cleverness.”
- Leo Tolstoy, 1889.
An autoimmune skin condition damn near ruined my life, so I agree with your conclusions.
I was somewhat fortunate that it didn't hit me until my mid-20s after a viral infection. Never gets better and will never go away. Treatments? Nothing but a cat and mouse game, and generally a waste of time, unless I want to subjugate my body and future to some truly heinous treatments.
Still, I have a lot to be thankful for e.g., it could be worse, a different disease, etc..
I think the hardest part for me to overcome is the envy I feel when I see other people. I sometimes actually feel like I am a lesser person because of the disease. Despite it being a skin disease, the mental toll has been far worse than the physical toll.
I like to try and guess people's ages. In real life, or on video, where their personalities influence my guess, I'm much worse than when looking at a still image.
With a still image often the quality of a person's skin is the only giveaway, and when that is the case I'm remarkably accurate most of the time. So I'm skeptical there's much one can do, and people's skin seems to age at roughly the same rate.
The linked study doesn't seem to support that "ears never stop growing" at least in the typical way one would read that sentence.
> This study supports the view that as people age, their ears get larger, particularly the ear circumference, which increases on average 0.51 mm per year. This enlargement is likely associated with aging changes of collagen
So they do get larger with age but not due to growing, but rather the typical aging of the skin + gravity tends to result in the ears enlarging in diameter.
sun effect is strong without a proper diet and outdoor activity. For example tomatoes are natural sun protection from the inside, much more efficient than creams & cosmetics. So it depends on the person lifestyle, you can't draw general conclusion from that trucker
My wife said one of the most valuable things she learned in nursing school is: I keep a picture of a healthy patient in my head, and when I look at a new patient I zero in on how they look different from a healthy patient.
I've often thought about that and used similar mechanisms in my tech work.
Have an idea of what should happen, compare it to what actually happens.
Even if it's not the thing you're actively working on, something being out of place tends to stick out as wrong and will help you notice problems earlier. An example from pairing with someone at work recently: "Wait a minute, that ran way too fast, there's no way it actually succeeded" - indeed, it had failed in a way the system couldn't detect.
I kinda thought everyone does this at at least a basic level. How else would you realize your code has the wrong output?
The photo at the top is most likely a smoker. Increased CO in your bloodstream, and the effect of nicotine, seems to kill capillary circulation in the skin (and likely elsewhere, including the brain, kidneys). One reason folks in their 40s-60s today look so much younger than people the same age from the 80s and before is likely from the reduced prevalence of smoking.
And the article mentions diabetes...which also damages the microvascularization though not to the same extent.
1 - Paper mentioned smoking and diabetes (the latter surprised me, though I hadn't thought of your example which is a good one).
2 - smoking increases CO to bloodstream, and nicotine. The latter stiffens the vascular system; the CO doesn't just damage it but is believed to damage the small muscles of the skin, leading to the pervasive and fine grained wrinkling.
3 - Acute diabetes also damages the microvasculature (stiffining and blocking) which leads to various problems like PAD; that diminished circulation makes the immune system less efficacious, so for example people get difficult to heal lesions and such that can lead to amputation.
My point in that regard was "huh, I can imagine that you could see signs of diabetes for similar reasons", though TBH by the time an ulcer shows up you probably have noticed other signs. But perhaps there are earlier traces for the non observant.
I wasn't claiming that diabetics and smokers would have the same external symptoms. I'm a diabetic nonsmoker myself, and largely wrinkle-free :-)
I would be surprised if nicotine alone had such deleterious effects. After all, nicotine has been used in energy drinks in Japan for years and viewed as innocuous as caffeine.
exact, the issue with smoking are all the smoke compounds, all more or less harmful for everyone not just the smoker, and the heat/friction/dryness in the throat of the smoker
>Results: Women with active sun exposure habits were mainly at a lower risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) and noncancer/non-CVD death as compared to those who avoided sun exposure. As a result of their increased survival, the relative contribution of cancer death increased in these women. Nonsmokers who avoided sun exposure had a life expectancy similar to smokers in the highest sun exposure group, indicating that avoidance of sun exposure is a risk factor for death of a similar magnitude as smoking. Compared to the highest sun exposure group, life expectancy of avoiders of sun exposure was reduced by 0.6-2.1 years.
It's amazing that people take hopelessly confounded studies like this and infer anything from them.
Yes the study says they tried to remove confounders. But if people could effectively remove confounders, there'd be no need for randomized trials (which are enormously expensive). Despite doing everything possible, scientists' best efforts to remove confounders still don't effectively substitute for actual randomization.
This study is from 1990-1992. Even with all the sophisticated software today, we still cannot remove confounders, so how bad was it in 1992?
Yes think the replication crisis makes it pretty clear that even with all the fancy software, we still can't remove confounders today (and probably never will).
You can pretty safely translate we removed confounders to: we slightly cooked the data and got this significant result.
I've been wondering this, too, and remembering back to childhood when my mom advised always moving from extremities inward towards the heart (sunscreen, toweling off, etc).
You could test this by comparing people who wet shave daily with those who don't. Lathering on the skin during wet shaving delivers an incidental massage.
There's questionable reporting in some parts of the article which makes me doubt how seriously I should take the rest of it. Case in point with the concept of moisturizer adding moisture. While the name implies that that's what it does, it actually prevents moisture your body provides from escaping, it doesn't add any moisture that isn't already there. While the end result may seem similar, it isn't, for example you can't keep adding moisturizer to get more and more moisture, you're capped by what your body provides.
Not true. There are different classes of moisturizers, some are water based and do actually add moisture. Then there are oilier ones that only keep moisture in.
I knkw this, because my skin is so dry and missing any protective layer that I have to apply both in sequence.
This is why, for example, you should never apply pure hyaluronic acid on dry skin/hair: it's a humectant, which means it works by sealing in existing moisture. You have to apply it to damp skin/hair to get the intended benefit.
In late 2020 I committed to only taking cold showers. I note several upsides after nearly three years of this:
- easier to forego caffeine, as cold water in the morning leaves me wide awake
- easier to use less water, in part because it's so easy to get out of the shower into a warmer environment
- mental health benefits, including increased confidence dealing with things I don't want to do but which are my adult duties- cold showers have helped me grow up
- my skin is healthier; I'm no longer soaping and heating away my natural oils (I only use soap if I'm actually dirty, though of course I still soap my hands throughout the day for food prep, etc), and maybe the constriction helps with lymph flow? Dunno about that, but my skin feels good these days, except my arms and hands, which get a lot of sun (and so I've been using sunscreen more often, moisturizing with olive & coconut oils, wearing long sleeves, staying in the shade, and spending more outside time in the morning and evening).
Massage is great, too, from oneself and/or another person; take some time moisturizing and applying different levels of pressure- an aunt said lymphatic massage is a light touch, not felt in the muscles. I don't take all her advice, mind, but it does feel good to be kind to my skin.
Edit to add: oh and pat down to dry off, rather than rubbing with a towel, so as not to remove oil. On the other hand, is it helpful to speed exfoliation? Maybe only if there's flaking dry skin, which needs more intensive care anyway? My understanding is that our skin sloughs off naturally and generally doesn't need extra help, depending on the individual.
Did you consider a hot-then-cold shower? After listening to a Huberman Lab episode on deliberate cold exposure I've started doing 2-3 minutes of cold at the end of my hot shower. Obviously it doesn't save on energy, but I definitely get the "wide awake" feeling you describe. And I get to enjoy a nice hot shower, too :)
Been doing this for years now. Thought it's what everyone did until I found out some people actually spend a lot of money to buy a container specifically to throw themselves into after filling it with cold water.
I prefer the gradual method, pushing the dial colder and colder as opposed to a quick instant cold shower. Still provides the benefits, but I can challenge myself on the days I want to by pushing just a bit colder.
I have experienced similar benefits. Some people even joked that I had a face lift, as I took that shower right before meeting them.
I started taking cold showers when the war between Russia and Ukraine made the bills go up and I could not afford to pay so much anymore. The first three days were awful to say the least. The water is freezing cold even in the summer because I think it comes from deep underground. I dreaded getting into the shower, but I had no choice. I either had to stay clean or in debt. So I went in and groaned like a monkey, cursing in between shallow breaths for a few minutes, but it became less unbearable after a while. I felt a headache, some dizziness and a general malaise afterwards. But once I got out of the shower, I stayed cool for three to four hours, actually feeling better than before.
From the fourth day on, it got easier and easier. At first, I could take a cold shower quietly with mild discomfort but later on, I could just get in right away without minding the temperature. Now I enjoy it so much that it has become an addiction and not a nightmare. It took more or less a week to get to that point.
I assume the vast majority of HN readers live in climate controlled residences where the temperature inside the residence and bathroom is more than the temperature of cold water, even in peak summer.
After 1hr+ of intense biking, I am in the same boat - body is so heated from the ride (often in the morning when it's cold so my extremities are quite cold) that hot water feels scalding, cold water feels really nice.
I made the coconut oil mistake once. It's oil. Must be good, right? Especially the extra virgin, no?
It does not moisturize at all. It dries out the skin something fierce. If you also use olive oil you might just be masking the bad side of the coconut oil.
http://web.archive.org/web/20230824150704/https://www.bbc.co...