Who doesn’t love spending time outdoors, especially when the weather is warm and the sun is shining? After all, many people dream of lounging on the beach, soaking in the sun’s rays. The sun does provide us with several health benefits, including Vitamin D, which is essential for strong teeth and bones. The sun’s rays have also been proven to enhance your mood and your energy. There are plenty of supplements and medications that provide you with these same benefits, but why shell out all that money when you can get sunshine for free?
However, despite the number of health benefits that the sun provides, too much sun exposure can actually cause significant skin damage, including premature aging and unsightly sun spots. Damage from the sun starts at a very early age, and stays with you for the rest of your life. Wearing sunscreen every day, even in the cold winter months, is critical for protecting the health and beauty of your skin. Moisturizers with SPF and BB creams can be your best friend for keeping your skin hydrated, protected, and looking its best.
Fortunately, in the event that sun spots do form, there are things you can do to remove these spots and restore the radiance to your skin.
Protecting Your Skin
As you age, your skin ages with you. However, the sun can age you at a much more accelerated rate. The UVA and UVB rays produced by the sun can cause fine lines, wrinkles, sun spots, and much more. At Clarity Medical Aesthetics, we offer an edited group of sunscreens with transparent zinc oxide to help protect the health and appearance of your skin from the damage the sun can cause.
Our Elta MD line provides broad-spectrum protection:
- Elta MD UV Clear is a facial sunscreen with SPF46 designed for sensitive, acne-prone skin.
- Elta MD UV Clear Tinted is offers just a hint of color and all the benefits of SPF 46.
- Elta MD UV Facial sunscreen with SPF 30 is perfect for dry, and post-procedure skin.
If you aren’t sure which product will serve your needs best, we are more than happy to help you!
What are Sun Spots?
Whether or not you want to admit it (and most of us don’t!), aging is a natural part of life. As you get older, your skin gets older, too. Over time, the skin begins to lose its elasticity. Fine lines and wrinkles form. Taking care of your skin can help to minimize these telltale signs of aging, or prevent them from occurring in the first place. But these factors are not the only things that can cause you to look older. Sun spots can also play a role.
Sun spots are areas of your skin that appear darker (or lighter) in color than your natural skin tone. Often confused with freckles, they are larger in size, and they frequently occur on the face and hands (although they can occur anywhere that sees excessive exposure to sunlight). They typically appear as you get older, however, they can begin to form at any age. It’s not all that uncommon to see sun spots forming as early as your 20s! (Yikes! Isn’t that a scary thought?)
While sun spots occur more commonly in individuals with lighter skin, sun spots can appear on any skin tone. Unfortunately, no one is immune to this, or any, effect of the sun. When sun spots strike, they can make you appear years older, almost instantly.
How Sun Spots Form
Exposure to sunlight plays a significant role in the development of sun spots. Sun spots, also referred to as age spots, often form as a natural result of the aging process. As you age, your body’s ability to repair itself decreases. The more exposure you have to sunlight, the more cell damage that is caused. Your skin can’t repair itself like it once was able to, and the effects become more prominent.
However, simply hiding yourself away from the sun, which is a very sad thought, won’t protect you. Sun is not the only factor in sun spot formation. There are other factors that can play a role in their development as well, including the natural pigmentation of your skin, yeast, fungus, Pityriasis Alba (a skin disorder), or hypomelanosis (where areas of the skin lack pigmentation).
Fixes for Sun Spots
Sun spots sound pretty scary, right? But just because you notice them forming, that doesn’t mean that you’re doomed. At Clarity Medical Aesthetics, we want to help you look and feel your best. If sun spots are plaguing your skin, we offer plenty of options:
- Clarity CE Ferulic. This potent serum is packed with the antioxidant power of ferulic ester, along with vitamins C and E. It works to boost your body’s natural collagen production.
- Cosmetix Pure C. Cosmedix is another line of skin care products that we offer. Pure C utilizes vitamin C crystals to even your skin tone, reducing the appearance of unwanted sun spots.
- IPL (intense pulse light) and Laser Rejuvenation. IPL treatments do not actually utilize a laser. Instead, this particular treatment is a type of light therapy that penetrates deep into the skin to treat sun spots and other signs of aging. Many people confuse light based energy treatments with laser treatments.Here is a simple way to distinguish the two. IPL is more like a flashlight beam picking up browns and reds within the color spectrum. Laser is a focused beam with one specific endpoint to target tissue—veins, hyperpigmentation, skin or hair. Laser is better for individual issues. Both work for sun spots.
I chose IPL for this patient because she had generalized pigment issues with a few larger spots.
Getting some sunshine in your life helps your body (and your mind) to stay strong and healthy. The media glamorizes spending hours outside in sunlight to get a sexy, tan glow. However, what they fail to mention is that overexposure can be damaging.
Taking proper precautions to protect your skin from the harmful effects of the suns UVA and UVB rays is important. These include such things as covering up, wearing sunscreen (during every season), and limiting the amount of time you spend exposed. But just because you have sun spots, that doesn’t mean you’re stuck with them. Contact Clarity Medical Aesthetics today to find out how we can help you to restore beautiful, youthful skin.
