Essential Oils
The 4 Best Essential Oils for Skin Elasticity
Nov
Skin elasticity is one of the first casualties of aging. As we grow older, our skin begins to lose its ability to stretch and snap back into it's original shape. This causes sagging, wrinkles, and a somewhat leathery appearance. Naturally, many people want to reduce or eliminate this problem, and it's become a huge market.
Beauty products claiming to reduces wrinkles and improve elasticity are big money, and they're everywhere.
As with any other beauty product, some work and some don't, but most are overpriced and made with questionable ingredients. There's a better, cheaper, more natural way: essential oils.
Why Skin Loses Elasticity
Before we go into a discussion of essential oils and how they can help, let's go over some why your skin loses elasticity in the first place. Many people blame this on collagen.
Collagen is a protein found throughout the body, but it's especially prevalent in connective tissue, bones, and skin. It's one of the most important structures in your body, and your skin does lose collagen over time.
That said, there's another protein in your skin that may actually be more important when it comes to elasticity: elastin.
Elastin is the protein that gives your skin the ability to stretch and snap back to its original shape, and, like collagen, your skin naturally loses elastin over time.
There are several factors which can speed up the loss of collagen and elastin. Sun exposure, smoking, poor nutrition, and rapid weight loss can all accelerate the natural process.
Even if you eliminate these factors, however, there is still the natural process of losing collagen and elastin as you age which will cause your skin to lose elasticity.
How Essential Oils Can Help
Essential oils can minimize and even prevent wrinkles by boosting your collagen retention, reducing inflammation, smoothing out your skin tone, protecting your skin from sun damage, and promoting turn over of skin cells.
It's unclear which of these functions is the most useful, but all will contribute to some degree to improving skin elasticity.
Protecting your skin from damage is likely very important, and reducing inflammation will tighten your skin, so these two are probably the first things you should seek to do.
These are the best essential oils for skin elasticity.
Best Essential Oils for Skin Elasticity
Lemon Oil
Lemon oil isn't often thought of as a beauty product. It's used heavily in cleaning products, because its fresh scent and antimicrobial properties make it an excellent, natural, all-purpose cleaner.
Lemon oil is also commonly found in over the counter anti-aging products, because it's high vitamin-C and antioxidant content gives it strong anti-aging benefits.
The antioxidants combat the damaging effects of free radicals from air pollution, sunlight, smoke, and other environmental factors that can reduce skin elasticity.
This will protect your skin from suffering continued environmental damage while also helping to heal some of the environmental damage it's already suffered.
Lemon oil occurs naturally in lemon peels, which means it can be easily extracted from the fruit simply by removing the peels and pressing them to squeeze the oil out. You should only by lemon oil produced in this way, as it preserves the benefits of the oil.
This lemon oil is cold-pressed from fine Italian lemons, and bottled with no additives whatsoever.
Frankincense
Frankincense is a truly ancient essential oil. It's been used for medicinal purposes for most of recorded history, and possibly a lot longer than that.
Frankincense is extracted from the sap of the Boswellia tree, native to the Middle East and southern Asia. It's been used there as a painkiller, antiseptic, religious, and beauty product for thousands of years.
It also has natural soothing, anti-stress properties, and makes for a powerful stress relief tool. It has very strong anti-inflammatory properties, which are likely how it relieves pain and reduces stress. Frankincense has been shown to reduce sun spots, improving overall skin tone.
The anti-inflammatory properties also improve overall skin health, and it seems to have the ability to boost the regeneration of skin cells, which will also contribute to skin elasticity.
Frankincense is made from the sap of the Boswellia tree. The sap is extracted and then dried, and for much of human history it was used exclusively in this form. In modern times, we can take this processing one step further to yield a more concentrated, potent oil.
Steam distillation is a natural process in which the sap is heated, and the vapors from the heated sap are trapped and cooled, creating the essential oil. This is by far the best way to extract the oil from the sap while preserving all of it's healing benefits.
This frankincense oil is steam distilled and conveniently packaged in a roll-on bottle to make application directly to the skin easy and convenient.
Lavender
Lavender is probably the most well-known, widely-used essential oil. Its list of health benefits is, seemingly, never-ending. Lavender is anti-inflammatory, relaxing, anti-anxiety, anti-microbial, and more.
It's such an effective natural pain reliever that it's even been used by mothers giving birth to ease their pain.
The anti-inflammatory properties of lavender will improve your skin health and tighten the skin. Its antioxidant capacity will help to protect from future damage and to reduce some of the environmental damage that's already been done.
In addition, it will keep your stress levels low, which may have some beneficial properties for your skin, too.
Lavender oil should always be extracted via steam distillation. This is the best method, by far, to preserve the delicate aromatic compounds which carry the antioxidants and anti-inflammatory compounds.
This lavender oil is steam distilled from the finest Bulgarian lavender flowers, and bottled 100% pure.
Tea Tree Oil
Even your skin is fine, you should be using tea tree oil regularly. Tea tree oil is a potent anti-fungal, which makes an excellent treatment for conditions like dandruff and athlete's foot.
It also boosts the immune system, helps to regulate hormones, and supports good circulation.
Like tea itself, tea tree oil is also quite stimulating, and can give you a natural energy boost if you need it. Plus, it simply smells great. Tea tree oil is a good, all-purpose oil.
For skin elasticity, tea tree oil promotes better absorption of nutrients, including collagen, from your food.
Bad nutrition is one of the leading causes of poor skin elasticity, so anything which boosts your nutrient absorption is going to help.
It's always a good idea to get your essential oils from places where people have been growing the plants they come from for a long time.
These people will have the best understanding of how to grow the healthiest plants and how best to utilize them.
That's why this tea tree oil, made from the finest Chinese tea trees, is the best choice. Tea originated in China, and tea trees grown there are widely considered the finest in the world. This oil is also steam distilled, and bottled with no added ingredients.
How to Use Essential Oils
Normally, the best way to use essential oils is to use aromatherapy. Aromatherapy has been widely studied, and many of its benefits have been proven.
It's effective because when you inhale the essential oil, you're absorbing it directly into your bloodstream and then quickly distributing it throughout your body.
For most essential oil uses, that provides maximum benefit. It's also very easy and safe to use, and so it's generally the recommended method.
It will likely prove beneficial for those seeking to improve skin elasticity, too, but it's probably not the best way to use essential oils for this purpose.
Instead, if you're attempting to improve your skin elasticity, it's a good idea to apply the oil topically.
This way, you're applying the oil directly to where it needs to go and maximizing the benefits you want. To safely apply essential oils to your skin, you will need to dilute them first.
Essential oils are highly concentrated, and pretty much all of them are skin irritants in their pure form. That means you need to dilute them with a carrier oil. Carrier oils can be any oil you want.
There's no real reason you couldn't just add a few drops of your chosen essential oils to a bottle of vegetable oil and rub it on.
However, there are certain oils that are especially popular as carrier oils, both because they have their own health benefits and because many of them absorb into your skin very quickly, so they won't leave you feeling greasy.
The most popular carrier oil, and the one used by most manufacturers for their roll-on essential oils, is fractionated coconut, or MCT oil.
This oil is light, non-greasy, and odorless so it won't obscure the scent of your favorite essential oils. It has many reported health benefits of its own, although not many of these are related to skin elasticity.
Extra virgin olive oil is another excellent choice. It's extremely rich in antioxidants, which means it will provide its own extensive benefits in addition to the essential oils that you use.
The only downside is that EVOO has its own very potent smell, and this might clash with the essential oils you use.
Jojoba and almond oil are also quite popular. Both are believed to have beneficial, moisturizing effects on the skin which will help to reduce signs of aging and boost elasticity.
Both have a mild, slightly sweet scent that will probably compliment any essential oils you choose.
Once you choose your carrier oil, simply add a few drops of the essential oils you choose to the carrier oil, give it a quick shake to make sure it's all thoroughly blended, and you're good to go.
The exact amount of essential oils you add will depend largely on your personal preferences, but start off with 10-15 drops of each oil you want to use.
Which Essential Oils to Use for Skin Elasticity
Since there are multiple factors that influence skin elasticity, and since each oil has distinct benefits, you shouldn't limit yourself to just one essential oil.
Instead, it's best for you to blend together many, it not all, of the essential oils we've listed in order to maximize the benefits you get.
As a rule, when you're using essential oils for skin elasticity, you want to choose some oils that have strong antioxidant properties, some that have strong anti-inflammatory properties, and some that will tighten and smooth the skin.
At the very least, that likely means a combination of lemon, frankincense, and/or lavender. Try adding 10-15 drops of each one to your carrier oil, and you may even consider blending different carrier oils to increase the benefit to you skin.
How Often to Apply Essential Oils for Skin Elasticity
There's little danger of overdosing on these essential oils, so the biggest limit to how often you can apply them is how often you want to buy them.
That said, you do need to wait for a bit after applying lemon oil to your skin before you go outside.
The oil will react with sunlight and can cause permanent discoloration or even severe burns. So, if using the lemon oil, it's best to do it before bed.
Other than that, you can safely apply the oils every day or even more than once per day. It's all up to you.
Conclusion
Any or all of the essential oils listed here will provide a lot of benefits for skin elasticity. Antioxidant activity from the oils will protect your skin from environmental damage resulting from sunlight and air pollution.
Anti-inflammatory properties will smooth and tighten the skin, reducing the appearance of wrinkles and improving elasticity. Other oils boost nutrient absorption, maximizing the amount of collagen you'll absorb from your diet and keeping your skin young and smooth.
For the best results, you'll want to blend several oils together. You need to use oils that have antioxidant properties as well as anti-inflammatory oils to ensure that you're addressing every causing of aging skin.
If you only use one or two oils and you aren't seeing any benefit, it's likely that you haven't addressed every cause of your skin's fading elasticity.
Just remember that, whichever oils you use, you need to dilute them in a carrier oil before applying them to your skin. And, don't expose your skin to direct sunlight right after applying lemon oil to it.
It's commonly believed that because essential oils are all natural there's no way they can hurt you, but this isn't true. All natural products lack the long lists of side effects that pharmaceutical products have, but when used improperly they can still cause problems.
That said, lemon oil is great for your skin- just apply it before bed and you won't have any problems. Essential oils can make a huge difference in your skin care routine, and they're much safer and more affordable than anything you can buy in the beauty aisle.
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