CyberDERM- The Sunscreen Company TM: The Pop Science of Wrinkles

I don’t know how many of you remember high school chemistry but think back to molecules with electrons circling protons. Now imagine this molecule is actually oxygen and some incident occurs that makes one of the electrons go rogue or invites an unwelcome electron to join their group. This oxygen molecule becomes like a roving gang, searching for its missing member, or trying to get rid of its new buddy. Either way, it starts attacking and damaging innocent bystanders (i.e. our other cells) that it comes into contact. Those cells could be our own DNA molecules or essential proteins or lipids in the different layers of skin. Our cells are used to generating a certain amount of free radicals naturally and we have certain mechanisms internally for neutralizing them. As we age or are exposed to sun and pollution, we can start creating too many free radicals for our bodies to handle. This over production can either tell the cell to hibernate or tell it to commit cellular suicide (for lack of a better word). Now imagine that suicidal cell was one that made up your collagen or elastin fibers. Those fibers are like the springs in a mattress. Old creaky springs that are slowly disintegrating make for a lumpy mattress. Now imagine that all of those horribly mixed metaphors are happening to your face and you’ll start eating your fruits and veggies and putting on your sunscreen every day.

This is another tricky concept so bear with me. Picture your DNA as a stick of dynamite. Our DNA tells our cells a host of things to do, including when to begin the process of splitting into another cell (the process of mitosis). Now picture this stick of dynamite has a long fuse attached to it. That long fuse is what we would call your telomeres. They are these little caps on the ends of your DNA and that just like a fuse on dynamite begin to shorten down. As time elapses, that fuse is depleted to nothing and then BOOM! Your cell, or that stick of dynamite, explodes. Well it does not actually explode (you can imagine that would be messy) but it certainly commits that cellular suicide we mentioned. Those cells again can be important elastin and collagen fibers, which we need for pinch-able skin. The trick is to find ways to keep those telomeres from shortening and increasing the life span of our skin cells. We know that women typically have longer telomeres than men (i.e. which could explain our longer life spans) and that stress can actually increase the rate of telomere shortening. All of which indicates there are things that we can do to keep our ticking time bombs ticking a little bit longer. If you are interested or perhaps have a kid in need of a science project, check out this video that does a far better job explaining: - http://www.wehi.edu.au/education/wehitv/apoptosis_and_signal_transduction/

The whole science of our genes and mutations is still evolving so there are lots of unknowns in this field. Basically, genes in aging cells that deal with cellular death may start getting a little bit more boisterous at the proverbial party. Meanwhile, the genes that regulate good things like growth or collagen synthesis or that regulate important enzymes might start to become shrinking violets. Mutations can potentially occur through damaging UV light or free radicals that tell portions of our DNA to improperly replicate or create odd breaks in the strands. Chaos and a host of other bad things start to happen and the party gets shutdown by the cops before things get exciting. I don’t know what the cops are in this metaphor or what can be considered exciting but you get the idea.

Ooph…science is tiring. All in all, these are not easy concepts to wrap your mind around. I suppose it is good enough to understand that in general we want to stem the tide of these processes of aging and not necessarily for vanity purposes. The recipe of prevention is pretty much what has become common sense of a health lifestyle lexicon. Easy enough to know, not always easy to do. In any case, I may have to retire my scientific visualizations- I’ll leave them to the ‘geeks’ of the world and stick to beauty.

Sign of Aging	Intrinsic Processes of Aging
Wrinkles/ Laxity of Skin	Free Radicals and Anti-oxidation
Dry, rough and dull	Cell Senescence
Discolouration	Genes and Mutations
Thinning of Skin