Do you wish you had younger looking skin with fewer wrinkles? There are many products and procedures on the market today aimed towards making your skin appear younger. The most important things you can do for your skin however, don’t cost a cent, and the sooner you start, the better your results will be.

No matter how old you are, it’s never too soon or too late to be worried about aging skin care. Your skin, being the outermost layer of your body, is the part of you that people see, and reflects your overall state of health and age. If you are concerned at all about how you appear, it’s therefore a good idea to take good care of your skin.

The best method of skin care is to start young. The effects of age on skin do not happen overnight, and actually starts occurring right after you’re born. You could even argue that your skin begins to ‘age’ the moment it is formed inside the womb. Although it seems to age all of a sudden for a lot of people, in a period of just a few years, the visible effects of aging skin are the result of a process that has been happening for as long as you’ve been alive.

So think about that when you want to be in the sun all day to get a tan. You may not notice the aging effects right away, but in 10 or 20 years when you skin is wrinkled and leathery, you might regret having spent so much time in the sun.

Another key form of aging skin care is to avoid tobacco and alcohol. Smoking anything, especially tobacco, is a great way to infuse your entire body with free radicals, and too much drinking will do the same.

So the sooner the better with aging skin care. What causes skin to age are a few different things. But the major visible reason for aging skin comes down to damage done to the elastic proteins  which your skin has to keep tight. What causes the damage is chiefly free radicals. You might be wondering what free radical is? A free radical is just a fancy chemistry word for an oxygen compound gone wrong. It actually doesn’t have to be oxygen, but in our environment it almost always is. An oxygen molecule that has been split is highly reactive and very corrosive to pretty much everything it comes in contact with, including the proteins in your skin.

Since oxygen is everywhere, you can’t really avoid this corrosive effect all together. However, you can lower the amount of free radicals that occur in your skin in a few ways. UV radiation is a major source of free radicals, as it is just the right wavelength to split oxygen molecules, so staying out of the sun is a good form of aging skin care. A little sun light everyday is okay, and actually good for you, but it’s never a good idea to lay out all day in the sun if you’re worried about aging skin care. Even using sunscreen, some UV rays are going to get through and do damage over time.

Advances are being made in skin care all the time, some day there may be a way to repair damaged skin, but for right now the best advice is to minimize the damage you do to your skin in the first place.