Is anti-aging skin care really necessary?

For most ordinary people who have skin care habits, this is actually not a yes-or-no question of "necessary or unnecessary", but a multiple-choice question of "which one is more suitable for your needs" - of course, some people think it is not necessary, and there is no standard answer.

There is a 41-year-old self-employed sister next to me who always washes her face with water and adds dozens of dollars of moisturizer. She always wears a wide-brimmed hat and long sleeves when going out. She goes to bed before ten o'clock in the evening and never eats high-sugar foods such as milk tea and cakes. Last time we went for a skin test, her dermal layer density was higher than that of many 27- and 8-year-old girls who spend money every day to buy anti-aging essences. She always said that "anti-aging is a consumer trap created by brands." This is really not a lie. After all, academic circles have long concluded that 70% of skin aging comes from photoaging, and the remaining 30% is linked to natural aging, work and rest, diet, and emotional stress. If you are genetically responsible for aging, and can strictly protect yourself from the sun all year round, and stay healthy with your work and rest and diet, you really don’t need to spend extra money on anti-aging skin care, and just accept the rhythm of natural aging calmly.

But having said that, there are really only a few people who can achieve such a high degree of self-discipline. Let’s just say that I work in the content industry. Last month I worked on a quarterly project and stayed up late for eight days. I didn’t go to bed until after two o’clock every day. When I woke up in the morning, I was shocked when I looked in the mirror. My tear trough collapsed by half a millimeter. My apples also felt like they were sinking. It would take at least two or three months if I had to wait for work and rest to adjust. During that time, in addition to trying to catch up on sleep, I applied peptide essence every morning and evening, and used a home radio frequency device twice a week. For about three weeks, most of the damaged areas were healed. Do you think anti-aging skin care is useless at this time? Not really.

In fact, anti-aging skin care is a bit like maintaining a private car. If you plan to replace it every three to five years, it doesn’t matter if you wear it regularly. Then there is really no need to do regular maintenance.； But if you want to drive it for ten or eight more years, and you have to build it once in a while, it is definitely more cost-effective to do some basic maintenance on a regular basis than to wait for the engine to have problems and then overhaul it.

There is no need to be coerced by the anti-aging anxiety on the Internet, thinking that if you don’t apply anti-aging essence at the age of 20, your life will be over, and there is no need to save money and buy a lady’s anti-aging line that exceeds your consumption capacity. After all, the most effective anti-aging actions are all low-cost or even free: applying sun protection, staying up less late at night, and drinking two cups of full-sugar milk tea. These are much more effective than anti-aging essences that cost thousands of dollars per bottle. Those products that claim to "reduce nasolabial folds in 7 days" and "return to girlish face in 28 days" are definitely IQ-taxing, but effective ingredients such as retinoids, peptides, and Bose, which have been clinically proven for decades, can indeed help you maintain the firmness of your skin in a better state as long as you establish a good tolerance for it and use it for a long time. The results may be slow, but they are more reliable.

At the end of the day, whether you want anti-aging depends entirely on your own needs. If you think aging is a natural process and wrinkles on your face don’t affect your happiness, then you don’t need to touch them at all. My mother is 60 years old and has never used skin care products worth more than 100 yuan in her life. Every time I buy her anti-aging cream, she is scolded by her as a waste. She dances square dance every day and is happier than anyone else. But if you care a little about the condition of your skin, don’t want to look older than your peers because of staying up late and getting too much sun, and you don’t have the self-discipline to do it year-round, it’s not a waste of money to choose reliable anti-aging products. Your comfort is the most important thing.