For all those who want more than just the drugstore’s mush.
Who is this post for? It is for all those who want to get more out of their skin and are ready to leave the comfort zone of the drugstore. When it comes to anti-aging, the drugstore makes us fall asleep and the clocks stand still. Also because manufacturers would have to fear mass complaints if they were to use certain active ingredients in effective concentrations, because these may not feel good at first and/or cause side effects.
We have therefore been fed up with drugstore food for a long time, which in the end everyone has to decide for themselves. We are dm and Rossmann children ourselves, but we simply don’t buy skin care there anymore. Even back then, in 2013, we were still armed with a real block and pencil and were still in the drugstore, had our first handwritten checklist of active ingredients with us and wanted to see which products contained them. After hours of work and feeling a thousand pots and tubes later, Olaz and Diadermine just made it into our basket.
But today, more than 4 years later, we have quite different anti-aging treasures ready. If it’s about high-end active substances, i.e. substances whose effect has been proven and which even dermatologists use successfully over decades, you’ll like our contribution. Even old INCI hares may learn something new. Today we are also discussing which special active ingredients we still use regularly after years and how we can reconcile them all.
Fine-tuning thanks to anti-aging special active ingredients
Why so special? Why do we have to turn bathroom upside down? There used to be a piece of soap and the well-known Nivea can. We have long broken through such old patterns. Because if you know how, nobody has to look older than he is. So we can help determine how we age through coordinated skin care, potent active ingredients and a healthy lifestyle. This is superlative anti-aging.
Rough, dull, dry or oily skin? Loss of elasticity, wrinkles, sun damage, pigment spots or acne? On the other hand, several herbs (active ingredients) have grown at the same time, some of which have a lot of hum, so they don’t have to be the Holy Grail for everyone. Some of them also require a prescription.
The over-the-counter active ingredients do not need to hide behind the prescription ones in terms of their effect, they are also better tolerated by the skin, are more beautifully formulated, more elegant in their application and also slow down the aging process of the skin: and that lets us gain years in appearance. Who doesn’t want that when you know how to do it!
What special active ingredients do you need?
We have been using glycolic and salicylic acid since 2013, retinoids since 2014 and ascorbic acid since 2015 and for some time azelaic acid, which plays a subordinate role for our skin compared to the other active ingredients. We can now look back on several years of experience.
In general, the division of the active ingredients into morning and evening has proved successful for us: ascorbic acid in the morning and chemical peelings and retinoids in the evening. You can read how often we currently use them and why.
Note: Which active ingredients you need in the end or not depends on whether you can tolerate the individual active ingredients, which skin problems you want to solve and which active ingredients you want to use consistently in the future to support the skin to stay fresh and crunchy, hello collagen build-up – for a beautiful and firm skin at any age!
We start with glycolic acid (AHA), our favourite active ingredient. Oh, yawn, could say die-hard readers. Yep, we’d say, because we’ve been digging up Dr. Denese, Dr. Schultz and other things worth knowing about what we’ve been doing in the last few weeks. PS: This article should be much shorter :D…
Important: Glycolic acid or retinoids or both?
The following was new territory for us: For Dr. Neal Schultz, glycolic acid has even replaced retinoids, yes, read correctly! To understand: Retinoids are the umbrella term for substances related to vitamin A. Dr. Schultz refers to the prescription variant tretinoin (vitamin A acid), which was patented in America in 1967 under the name Retin-A as an acne remedy by Dr. Kligman:
In 1967, he patented Retin-A, a vitamin A derivative known generically as tretinoin, as an acne treatment and received a new patent in 1986 after discovering the drug’s wrinkle-fighting ability. Source Washington Post, this post is also interesting Retinoids in the treatment of skin aging. Actually an acne drug, but in the early 1980s it was discovered that tretinoin also fights the effects of photoaging. Photoaging means premature skin aging due to UV radiation:
The skin ages faster than normal, resulting in (deep) wrinkles, coarser dermis, sagged, rough skin, redness and pigmentation disorders. The active ingredient was then also approved as an anti-wrinkle agent, which is only available on prescription. Since then, retinoids have been on everyone’s lips in dermatology. This is also the case in his practice. When glycolic acid came onto the market in the 1990s, he decided against retinoids and for glycolic acid.
There are good reasons why tretinoin is only available on prescription. It is much more aggressive/skin-irritating than the freely available variant retinol, which even in low doses improves the appearance of the skin and is usually very well tolerated. Tretinoin, on the other hand, can peel the skin, which is why it also serves as a peeling in dermatological practices in higher dosages (1-5% / cf. Tretinoin creams are available with 0.025%, 0.05% and 0.1%, which can already lead to stronger side effects, so also to a stronger skin flaking, ouch!).
