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TIMELESS
FINNIES THE JEWELLER
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PROTECTION
I’ll start with this. If you do nothing else for your face, wear sunscreen. Please. A moisturiser with sunscreen, a hydrating primer with sunscreen, anything as long as it shields your skin. Any dermatologist will tell you that 90 per cent of what we think of as the signs of ageing – the wrinkles, rough texture, the age spots – is the direct result of years of exposure to ultraviolet light. And not just the ‘burning’ UVB rays you get from hot sun and holidays abroad, though this doesn’t help, but everyday exposure to boring old grey and drizzly daylight, which bombards us with UVA light all year round (it travels through glass, too, so will catch you in the car, or at a desk by the window).
So a product that protects against these rays will do more than anything else to slow down the rate at which your skin is ageing. Two of my current favourites are La Roche-Posay Anthelios Ultra-Light SPF50, £16.50 at Boots, and Olay Regenerist Luminous Brightening Moisturiser, SPF20, £29.99.
EXFOLIATION
Exfoliating your face is helpful because it gets rid of the dead cells that hang around on the skin’s surface. Rather than using face scrubs, which I feel are a bit rough for older skin, try a product based on exfoliating acids such as Alpha-H Liquid Gold (£33.50, www. cultbeauty.co.uk), Vichy Idéalia Peeling (£30, www. vichy.co.uk) and Beauty Pie Fruitizyme Five Minute Facial (this costs £5.86 if you’re a member of Beauty Pie’s subscription beauty club, £50 if you’re not) – and use it twice a week. Don’t be put off by the word ‘acid’ – these won’t burn holes in your skin, but will gently dissolve the bonds that are keeping the old skin cells stuck to the surface. Without this debris, your skin will look fresher and smoother.
HYDRATION
This is vital to plump up skin cells, which get less good at hanging on to moisture as they get older, and will have the added benefit of making fine lines on the face look less obvious. Look for products containing hyaluronic acid (a substance which is a natural part of the moisturising elements found in your own skin and holds many times its own weight in water) such as The Ordinary’s Hyaluronic Acid 2%
(£5.60, www.victoriahealth.com) or Dr Sebagh’s luxurious Serum Repair (£86.25, www.drsebagh.com). Use a few drops of this on your face in the morning before your sunscreen, and in the evening before your night cream, and you will soon see the difference.
DON'T FORGET YOUR NECK
Whatever skincare you choose, take it all the way from your hairline to your neckline. If you fancy trying a dedicated neck cream, Prai’s Ageless Throat and Decolletage cream, £19.99 at Boots, is an absolute cracker (it promised to make
a visible improvement to my neck in seven days. I didn’t believe it would, but it did; the pictures are on my blog). And as an all-in-one shortcut to hydrate, protect and replace make-up, Bareminerals’ Complexion Rescue Tinted Gel (£28, www. bareminerals.co.uk) has few equals. It’s moisturising, it has SPF30, it gives skin a light wash of colour and it comes in 16 shades.
FACIALS-PLUS
Should you want to take things a bit further, here’s a couple of what you might call ‘facials-plus’, which will perk up your face more than a pampering salon treatment without going as far as Botox and fillers.
The Hydrafacial deploys a pen-like device tipped with a whirling vortex of water to exfoliate the skin, extract debris, give the skin a light peel and flood it with hydrating serums (from £120, see www.hydrafacial.co.uk for salons). Afterwards, your skin looks fresh and glowing, and will be more receptive to whatever skincare you are using.
Then there’s CACI Synergy, a treatment which combines electrical microcurrents that lift and tone the muscles in the skin with LED light therapy (this is soothing and painless) that reduces pigmentation marks (from £80; for salons, see www. caci-international.co.uk). You’ll see the difference after one treatment, but doing a course of these will give longer-lasting results.
And talking of skin pigment, which has a way of gathering itself into brown age- spots on our faces and hands as we age, the most effective way to soften this is with a treatment or two of Intense Pulsed Light (IPL), which uses bursts of light to break up the pigment under the skin. It feels a bit like having an elastic band flicked at you – not pleasant, but not intolerable – and costs around £80 a session (search online to find salons that offer the treatment near you. It’s a well- established and well-proven technology, and is widely available).
ABOVE LEFT:
Alice Hart-Davis recommends wearing a moisturiser or hydrating primer with sunscreen to guard against
the ageing effects of ultraviolet light