Every year, upwards of $140 billion a year gets spent on cosmetics. In the United States alone, says an authoritative report, a recent year saw upwards of 5.6 million Botox procedures, 1.1 million chemical peels, almost a half-million laser skin procedures, 196,286 eyelid surgeries and a whole bunch of face lifts.
If you've got the courage to compare your present-tense face with the one you were wearing 20 or even 10 years ago, you'll see why. As I wrote in a just-published Stanford Medicine article, "Wither youth?":
The terrain of aging skin grows all too familiar with the passing years: bags under the eyes, crow’s feet, jowls, tiny tangles of blood vessels, ever more pronounced pores and pits and pigmentation irregularities. Then there are wrinkles — long, deep “frown lines” radiating upward from the inside edges of the eyebrows and “laugh lines” that trace a furrow from our nostrils to the edges of our lips in our 40s, and finer lines that start crisscrossing our faces in our 50s. Sagging skin gets more prominent in our later years as we lose bone and fat.
"And," I added wistfully, "it’s all right there on the very outside of us, where everyone else can see it."
Stanford dermatologist Anne Chang, MD, who sees a whole lot of skin, got to wondering: Why does skin grow old? Armed with a sophisticated understanding of genetics, she went beyond lamenting lost youth and resolved to address the question scientifically, asking: “Can you turn back time? Can aging effects be reversed? Can you rejuvenate skin, make it young again?”
The answers she's come up with so far - from hereditary factors to a possible underlying genetic basis for how some treatments now in common commercial cosmetic use (such as broadband light therapy) could potentially slow or even reverse the aging of skin - are described in my magazine article.
Previously: This summer's Stanford Medicine magazine shows some skin, Researchers identify genetic basis for rosacea, New study: Genes may affect skin youthfulness and Aging research comes of age
Photo by thepeachpeddler
