What should I do if I have freckles at a young age?

A few days ago, a friend asked me what to do if spots start to appear on the face in his twenties? Indeed, normally, spots on the face should only start to appear around the age of 30. If spots start to appear so early, you may need to consider whether it is a problem with the individual's environment and personal lifestyle habits, of course, excluding genetic factors.

Here, it is recommended to consider some details in life first, such as sun protection. If the sun protection is not done well, it is easy to cause facial melanin deposition, resulting in spots. In addition, if there is an irregular lifestyle and poor diet, it is easy to cause poor facial skin health and spots. However, since spots have already begun to appear, you should consider how to lighten them.

01. Why do spots appear?

As we all know, melanin is a protective substance that is produced by melanocytes in the basal layer of the skin. When the skin is exposed to sunlight for a long time, the ultraviolet rays in the sunlight will be irradiated on the skin in large quantities. These ultraviolet rays have strong penetrating power and are easy to damage cells. You can imagine that when we use ultraviolet disinfection, we actually kill the germs through ultraviolet rays. Although the ultraviolet rays in sunlight are not as high as the dose used for disinfection, the damage caused cannot be ignored.

In this case, in order to reduce the damage caused by ultraviolet rays, our skin melanocytes start the self-protection process, producing melanin through a series of reactions, and then these melanin gradually come to the surface of the skin through cell metabolism to resist the skin damage caused by ultraviolet rays. It can be seen that the production of melanin itself is a normal defensive behavior and is beneficial to health.

However, these melanins are not so friendly to our aesthetics. Melanins not only easily cause the skin color to darken, but also cause freckles, sun spots or chloasma on the skin, which brings troubles to many people.

02. How to lighten spots?

To sum up, to deal with skin spots, the first thing is to target the production of melanin caused by ultraviolet rays.

However, light treatment of the pigment caused by ultraviolet rays is only a temporary solution, and we must deal with skin damage at a deeper level. In fact, the body's melanin production is not only related to ultraviolet rays, but also to skin damage. When the skin is damaged, many regulatory factors such as interleukin, tumor necrosis factor, endothelin, etc. are released to repair cells. However, these ingredients themselves can stimulate the relatively calm melanocytes in the basal layer, accelerate the production of melanin, and lead to post-inflammatory pigmentation. The result is that even though we have done a good job of sun protection, the skin will still produce spots, and the reason behind this is skin damage.

Therefore, the strategy to deal with pigmentation should be a combination of two strategies: quick response - sniping melanin; long-term response - repairing skin damage. The skin care field has currently made a series of research progress in these aspects.

03. How to target melanin?

How to target melanin? The typical ingredients that directly deal with melanin are vitamin C and its derivatives. As a vitamin that everyone is familiar with, vitamin C can act on melanin, reduce melanin, thereby eliminating melanin and accelerating melanin metabolism.

Citric acid is another common ingredient for eliminating melanin. As an organic acid, citric acid can also act directly on melanin and break it down, thereby accelerating melanin metabolism and diluting melanin deposited on the surface.

At present, there are still many ingredients that can penetrate deep into the skin to block the production of melanin from the source.

04. How to repair skin damage?

We have talked about how to deal with the production of melanin before, but this is only one aspect. Repairing skin damage can better cut off the continuous production of melanin.

The most common skin damage repair agent is hyaluronic acid, which is a disaccharide unit glycosaminoglycan composed of D-glucuronic acid and N-acetylglucosamine. Many people may be confused when they see this, what is this thing, but it has another very popular name, that is: hyaluronic acid.

I guess many young ladies are familiar with it. It is a common guest in skin care products and cosmetics. Hyaluronic acid is the main component of the interstitial and extracellular matrix of skin cells. It is an ideal natural moisturizing factor and is widely used in skin care products. It has the characteristics of clear efficacy, mildness and non-irritation, so it is also the number one star player in skin care. And different molecular weights of hyaluronic acid have different effects:

Large molecular hyaluronic acid (molecular weight greater than 1 million Daltons) can form a breathable film on the skin surface, blocking the invasion of foreign bacteria, dust, and ultraviolet rays, enhancing the skin's response to the surrounding environment, and avoiding further damage to sensitive skin caused by external stimuli.

Small molecule hyaluronic acid (molecular weight less than 10,000 Daltons) can penetrate the skin barrier and reach the dermis directly due to its small molecular weight. It has the repair effects of promoting angiogenesis, improving intermediate metabolism, promoting nutrient absorption, and increasing skin elasticity.

There are already some skin care products on the market that combine the above-mentioned large and small molecular hyaluronic acids to repair the skin. The large molecules protect and the small molecules repair, thus providing double protection for the skin.

The formation of skin spots is a complex process, and there are many influencing factors. To deal with spots, it is necessary to remove melanin and solve the root cause of skin damage. Daily sun protection and lifestyle adjustments are naturally essential.