In the first five chapters of this book, we’ll be showing you tips and tricks that will help your skin glow, your hair shine, and your body shrink. They’re things that we believe will not only make you look better to the rest of the world but also help you feel a lot better in your inner world.
1
In the Flesh
YOU Test: Tale of the Tape
To take your facial fingerprint, pull out a roll of Scotch tape. Make sure your face is clean (without makeup, sunscreen, moisturizer, or peanut butter for at least two hours). Place a piece of tape vertically on the middle of your forehead from your scalp to the area between your eyebrows. Move it to the outside corners of your eyes, across the apple of each cheek, and above your lip. Press gently in each spot, leave it for a few seconds, and carefully remove. Check the tape for lines and flakiness.
If your tape is completely smooth: You have the skin of a typical 30-year-old.
If you have flaky or dead cells but no lines: You have the skin of a typical 40-year-old.
If you have flaky cells and small lines: You have the skin of a typical 50-year-old.
The world glows all around us. There’s the celestial kind of glow—the stars, the moon, the sun. And there’s the artificial kind—the night-light inside the baby’s room and the neon lights outside the nightclub. But the most wonderful glow we can think of is the living, breathing kind—the kind that comes in the form of human skin.
We all know or have seen people who radiate—who have the kind of smooth, shiny, healthy, glowing skin that could light up Times Square. But you know what? We all have that potential. The problem is that many of us treat our skin like wrapping paper; it starts out looking pretty enough, but eventually we’re going to find a way to tear it up.
Now, this glow we’re talking about isn’t just the result of good genes. It’s also the result of making good choices to protect, heal, and clean your skin. We all have the ability to make those decisions. European cars “glow” more than American cars because the manufacturers use smaller drops of color that reflect more light than they refract. Your skin works the same way: If you ruin your reflection through a buildup of oil or dead skin, you lose the glow (and your full beauty potential).
Of course, it goes without saying that pornographic and beauty-product entrepreneurs aren’t the only people who know the value of skin. We all know the risks of exposing our bare skin to the sun, snake fangs, and camera phones. And we also know that the way our skin looks goes a long way toward determining how we feel about ourselves. If we don’t look beautiful, we don’t feel it. And if we feel beautiful inside, we reflect it in our skin. So if you have smooth skin that radiates, then you feel and look younger—and probably are younger on the inside, an important aspect of your overall well-being and health. But if you feel depressed and reclusive, you may have more wrinkles than a shar-pei or become spotted, dotted, and blemished. And that’s one of the reasons why you should read this chapter. Ultimately, your skin communicates messages about your youthfulness, your vibrancy, and your health. Face it: Skin sells.
FACTOID
We love exercise. But exercise for the face? That’s an idea whose time has not come. Exercising the facial muscles is a sure way to increase your wrinkles. The facial muscles pull on the skin to give you facial expressions. And the repetitive movements of the skin, over the years, combined with the normal thinning of the collagen and elastin of the dermis, will eventually crack the skin, causing wrinkling. Botox is the reverse of exercise; it paralyzes muscles and lessens wrinkles.
Safari Secrets:
Lessons from the animal kingdom
The reason why there are butterfly collectors and not moth collectors? The colors of moths are determined by scales that are shed, so they don’t keep their colors in the box, only in life—just like humans. The colors of a butterfly’s wings are never lost.
Your Skin: Let’s Flesh a Few Things Out
Funny, whenever we say something’s skin deep, we mean that it has about as much depth as a puddle. But that’s hardly the case with skin—it’s an amazing and complex organ that extends much deeper than the part we can actually see and touch. Your skin is the biggest and heaviest organ of your body, making up 15 percent of your body weight and covering 12 to 20 square feet. The composition: 70 percent water, 25 percent protein, and less than 5 percent fats. The obvious role of skin is to protect and to package. It protects our blood, organs, and bones from what’s outside, and it also packages our body neatly together so we’re not blobby organisms that leave trails of blood and bits of tissue everywhere we go.
And skin does more than serve as our anatomical casing. Skin also helps us with healing. How? Touching in that loving way reduces levels of the stress chemical cortisol and increases levels of the feel-good chemical oxytocin. And touching in that special way (massaging and caressing, not the touch of a slugger’s right hand) also stimulates the vagus nerve, which runs up to the brain to improve the health of our whole body.
So here’s how your skin works. While serving as an obvious barrier to the millions of chemicals and germs that want to invade your body, it also has a big sensory function. Deep in the skin, follicles grow hairs that can sense before your skin is actually touched. Eyelashes, for example, prompt the eyelid (through great nerve connections) to involuntarily close to protect the eye before you even know you’re in danger and to quickly flick off bugs before they bite.
Besides sprouting up hairs that sense things, your skin lubricates itself with oils we call sebum produced by sebaceous glands and also absorbs certain medications and hormones. But it can also absorb things, such as toxins, that you don’t necessarily want. And ultraviolet light can turn your own skin against itself by creating those much-talked-about damaging free radicals, not to mention changing your DNA (and usually not for the better).
Like many structures in your body (including your blood vessels), your skin has several components (see Figure 1.1).
FACTOID
We can generate as much as a gallon of sweat in two hours, so we don’t have to pant like a dog (dogs don’t sweat). Also, unlike dogs, most of us don’t shed our furry coat, but we do lose nine pounds of skin a year. That’s a lot of dust.
Epidermis: Serving as the body’s primary barrier against the outside world, the epidermis is less than a millimeter thick. Your skin is your raincoat, keeping your insides dry and letting you swim without swelling. Your epidermis is so well designed that only the right-size molecules can get through. The cool thing about your skin is that it renews itself every six to eight weeks. How? Dead cells from the epidermis continually slough off and are replaced by new ones from below (that’s one major way you get dust in your home—the sloughing off of skin). Your epidermis largely determines how fresh your skin looks—as well as how well it works in terms of absorbing and retaining moisture.
Dermis: The thickest of your skin layers, the dermis is what actually holds you together.* It’s your leather. The dermis is made up of cells called fibroblasts, which make collagen and elastin, proteins that give the dermis its strength and allow it to be stretched. Dotting the dermis are hair follicles, sweat glands, and sebaceous glands, which produce the oily sebum that lubricates your skin and hair. This sebum is really a mixed blessing; while it helps keep bacteria under control, it also attracts insects. Finally, the dermis contains tiny blood vessels (to nourish the skin) and lymph nodes (to protect it from toxins). Subcutaneous tissue: This innermost layer is made up primarily of fat and acts as a shock absorber and heat insulator for your body (many mammals, by the way, don’t have this because their fur does the same job).