5 Natural Skin Care Treatments For Anti-Aging and Beauty to Improve Your Complexion

Last updated on May 12th, 2023 at 09:45 pm

Our skin is our body’s largest organ. It helps regulate our temperature, protects us from outside infections and pollutants, and it even helps determine what we look like. Unfortunately, as we age, the health of our skin deteriorates — making wrinkles more prominent and skin tone uneven.

1. Aloe Vera

Aloe Vera is a great ingredient to include in your skincare routine because it’s gentle and soothing. It’s also an excellent moisturiser and can help make your skin look fresh and healthy.

Outshine the ‘normal’ moisturiser: do it first!It’s scientifically proven that applying moisturiser first will make your skin appear that much healthier. Apply this first thing in the morning and make sure it’s not on the heavy side. Plus, oils absorb quickly and make skin very let down. Give your skin a few minutes to absorb it before moisturising again. Try releasing trapped oils: this works for everyone.Taking a look at your skin, you’ll notice that many of the products you wear contain ample amounts of oils. Oils are trapped behind a barrier to help prevent things like water loss and impurities escaping. When these oils escape the barrier and onto the surface of your skin, they can harden and make you break out.

When present, these trapped oils can harm the microflora that are needed to keep skin healthy and keep it looking younger. By releasing the trapped oils, you can remove impurities (water, dirt, bacteria) so that your skin can produce more of the natural products to nourish it and moisturise it.

Try gentle cleansers: make sure your cleanser is gentle, non-irritating and cleansing, and will leave your skin feeling clean. Blackheads can feel so painful to remove so you don’t need to do this for too long!

Make sure your cleanser is hydrating: hydrating your skin increases hydration, which decreases inflammation. Try deep conditioning Plainseal Cleanser for example.

Start with a gentle face wash: does this mean you only use the bathwater approach or do you use a face wash with some other scent too? The choice is up to you.

Create a new skincare routine: start with white balancing powder and gentle cleansers and work down. You can add combinations like antioxidants, fermented products and vitamins to yours.

2. Green Tea

Green tea is one of the healthiest beverages on the planet and it’s loaded with antioxidants. Antioxidants are great for your overall health, but they’re also great at fighting off free radicals. Free radicals can cause damage to your skin, which can then cause signs of aging, like wrinkles and fine lines. Free radicals are even linked to the aging process itself, courtesy of the infamous mitochondrial free-radicals theory. Essentially, the more mitochondria in your cells, the more reactive they get. But if your antioxidants can get rid of the free radicals, you can lower your risk of all sorts of problems, including heart disease and cancer. They’re also the reason red and green tea have so many benefits. For one, both tasiness and chlorogenic acid (which gives green tea its color) deactivate free radicals. It doesn’t leave you with a taste, but it has antioxidant properties like Vitamin C.

Free radicals are good, but they’re also bad, and ones that accumulate in your body can cause all sorts of problems. Antioxidants, on the other hand, are the guardrails between good and bad molecules.

If your skin has an undesired look, it may be because you’ve got a lot of free radicals running around causing damage. Believe it or not, free radicals are not easy to remove from your skin. There are two main ways most skincare products tackle free radicals.

The “first line” of defense is with antioxidants — products that chase free radicals away. Researchers at University of Leeds have been studying the “antioxidant hunt” for over ten years. In their research, they found that there really aren’t “topicals” that fight free radicals, like Retin-A or Japonesse, that work all by themselves. There are other factors that you can tuck into your skincare arsenal to keep things effective.

You can do a lot of good after cleansing and pre-moisturizing — but it helps to know how to choose which antioxidants to use. Your skin is going to respond well to ingredients like Tea tree oil, Vitamin E, or L-theanine.

3. Olive Oil

Olive oil is a great ingredient to use in skincare because it’s full of antioxidants, vitamins, and fatty acids (like omega 9). Olive oil is great to use in skincare products like serums and creams because it penetrates the skin easily and allows you to reap the full benefits of the antioxidants and vitamins. Normal moisturizers (moisturizers with occlusive properties) use something called hyaluronic acid. This type of hyaluronic acid has a polar configuration, which is an unusual arrangement of androgen and estrogen receptors on the same molecule. This makes hyaluronic acid very good at adsorbing water, which makes it ideal for moisturizing skin. What makes olive oil so great for skincare is its higher concentration of natural healthy extra virgin olive oil compared to other oils. The skin barrier plays an important role in the homeostasis of the skin. That means if the skin barrier gets compromised, the skin can no longer maintain a healthy balance of oil, water, and nutrients for healthy skin.

Olive oil is an excellent moisturizer. It’s naturally occlusive so it locks in hydration and provides a barrier to nourish and protect your skin from environmental factors, like air pollution and damaging UV rays from the sun.

Additionally, olive oil absorbs into the skin easily. Upon application, it causes the skin to self-moisturize which opens up a canopy of pores to allow deeper penetration of other needed ingredients. Olive oil does not need to be blended in order to achieve good results, because it’s already present in the product.

When you think of an antioxidant skincare product, you may be tempted to think of skin trauma like exfoliation or chemical peeling. However, those ingredients also work to enhance skin barrier function to promote a healthy skin state.

In essence, effective antioxidants will support other types of effective skincare products for a more complete barrier function and healthy skin.

4. Honey and Sugar

Honey and sugar are essentially the same thing. Honey is a supersaturated solution of sugar. That means that the solute, the bit that’s dissolved, is sugar, and the solvent, the bit that’s dissolving it, is water. That means that the two have basically become the same thing.

This means that, in entirety, honey is a high-fructose corn syrup substitute. It’s unhealthy, unhealthy how much sugar you consume in one sweetener based product, and it’s absolutely not worth the thousands of dollars you’ll have to spend to get a jar of it. In the grand scheme of things, that’s kind of a funny thing to be focused on when you’re talking about cooking.

Let’s talk about flowers, though. The natural sugars in flowers, such as petrol, nectar, and pollen, are far sweeter than honey, and in many cases are completely edible. That’s not to say that they’re bad, though. They’re actually super healthy for you, and the research shows that they contain significantly higher levels of vitamins than just about any other food. Honeysuckle is a great source for Vitamin A, and as such can be eaten like jelly, straight out of the plant. It can even be used as a food coloring!

Since honeysuckle isn’t technically considered a honey substitute, I’m not gonna reference it as such, but you can buy powdered honeysuckle here.

Of course, in order to achieve that gelatinous goo, you’re gonna need honey, straight up. Luckily, no one really eats honey in the raw, which is a real problem when trying to cook with it, because it’s quite near impossible to get it pure. Even if I bought it at the store, once it left the lot several days in a humid environment it starts to turn into sludge.

To achieve an extravagant gooey dessert nonsense, you’re gonna need a bit of extra work! Firstly, I suggest starting by eliminating processed sugar at its source… in the raw.

5. Cocoa Butter

Cocoa butter is a superfood for your skin. It’s loaded with antioxidants and is a great moisturiser. A lot of people who are allergic to nuts still find that they can tolerate products that contain cocoa butter. It’s also great for healing acne scars.

Another superfood for your skin is flaxseed. Flaxseed has anti-inflammatory properties, and can help address eczema as well as psoriasis and other common skin conditions. It’s even great for reducing the appearance of stretch marks. You may be familiar with annoyed friends or family members who insist on going to the centre of town to get their periodontal patches checked. Often, their comments are along the lines of ‘we live in a big city, don’t we have the money to go to the centre of town for our periodontal patches?’ Well, wholeheartedly disagree. You can go to the local DPC or hospital for these minor procedures, and also have the attitude that everyone should drive somewhere for their nose patches. But flax seed! Go there! It’s only an hour away by public transport.

These superfoods are great is you already have limited skin care products, or if you’re looking to replace your diets due to a adverse reaction to a chemical peel or whatever.

The benefits of consuming these superfoods in conjunction with sunscreen provide your skin with an ample amount of protection against environmental pollutants and free radicals.

If you know someone who struggles with acne, having a few essential oils mixed into their morning and evening products could potentially reduce their acne.

The Above 5 Natural Treatments are Just Wonderful

So, there you have it! 5 of my favorite natural skin care ingredients that can make a difference to your skin.