Hi everyone, I'm Dr. Amir Karam, board-certified facial plastic surgeon, founder and creator of Karam MB Skin. I specialize in facial rejuvenation, which basically means I help people look as young as they feel. And on today's episode of Skin School, we're going to talk about the ABCs of skincare.
And what I mean by that is basically vitamins A, B, and C. But not just those, I'm going to talk about the perspective. of why and how you can create an optimal skincare routine that truly will defy aging. And I'm going to preface this by saying what we're going to talk about is how the skin ages, what is the most important thing you need to do to basically prevent and manage skin aging, and what and how these particular active ingredients, these important vitamins, fit into the spectrum, but also I'm going to give you a bonus at the end, some important other actives that are working in a different aspect and different capacity, but really why these vitamin A, B, and C are so critical to any type of active skincare routine.
All right, so let's break it down and let's discuss it this way. I think this will put everything in perspective for you. So what is happening to your skin during the aging process? So remember this. Starting around the mid-20s, and I think it's like 27 is the true peak of the collagen production of the skin.
And why is that so important? Well, the peak of collagen production means that what the skin is actually made of is being constantly reinforced and increased, right? So, if we take the thickness of the skin, the majority of what makes up that skin is collagen.
Now, of course, there's elastin, there's keratin, the majority of it is collagen. So, 27 is our peak. Collagen is being pumped and produced by the fibroblasts.
We love it. Skin looks amazing. Thick, supple, beautiful.
It's all the things that make up young looking skin. Then, there's a slow decrease as you can see in this chart here. This slow decrease continues from 27 on. Starting around perimenopause for women, there's a sharp decrease and that sharp decrease causes a major loss in the production. of collagen.
So remember we said thick skin, lots of collagen. What happens when the collagen is decreasing? Well, skin gets thinner. What's thin skin look like?
It looks crepey. It looks fine lines and wrinkled. It starts to, you know, have this kind of like softness to it. It doesn't have a good turgor to it.
All these things. Now, keep in mind that as this is happening, there's something that is causing this to occur. And what does that cause? It's estrogen.
And that is why this is correlating so closely. closely with perimenopause and menopause because as estrogen levels drop, so does the collagen. Your fibroblasts kind of go on vacation mode. They're like, okay, we've done enough over the last 45 years, 50 years, and hey, we don't want to do it anymore, right?
This is where we have to come in and bypass those lazy fibroblasts and get them to do what they want to do or what they're destined and truly meant to do, which is... To keep those collagen factories on and on and on for as long as we desire to have beautiful skin. Now here's the story.
It's kind of an interesting thing. As humans, you can make an argument we're not even supposed to be living that long, right? I mean pre-antibiotic era, life expectancy was around 30. Now suddenly life expectancy is in the 70s. We're 80s even in some countries and we're getting to a point where we're living longer and healthier lives and we want to look the way we feel, right?
Ultimately, we want to look the way we feel. So it behooves us to figure this thing out right. If we're young enough to hear this and we have great skin to begin with, you can actually prevent your skin from aging. You heard me right.
You can actually prevent your skin from aging. If you're a little bit more mature and your skin's gone through it a little bit and started to show signs of aging or has full-blown signs of aging, you can actually reverse a lot of those changes. And skincare is literally your hero in all of that. It's not lasers.
It's not microneedling. It's not surgery. We're talking about the actual skin. We're not talking about shape, by the way.
Just keep in mind, we're talking about skin. So skincare is super important, but most people don't get the skincare components right. Here's stuff here and there.
Friends are on this thing. The old knowledge, new knowledge, all gets mixed in and becomes a very confusing mess, and they rarely know what to do for themselves. So the ABCs is very simple. These are things that are going to directly influence their skin. Stimulate collagen.
And if we stimulate collagen over time, then what happens is, as this natural curve wants to go this way, we're going to turn it. back up and get back up to those levels that we had when we were younger. It's pretty straightforward.
It's a reasonable desire and an important goal to have, and we can do it. But why ABC is because not just one product, we're going to use multiple products to effectively create synergy. And synergy is the concept where one plus one equals three or four, it doesn't equal two, right? So when you're using things that are working in tandem, in combination, we're getting way more it is a nonlinear type of an improvement.
So everything I'm going to mention here, I'm going to give you five collagen stimulating actives that really should be in your skincare routine every single day. And then I'm going to give you a few other things that are going to help other aspects of your skin as a bonus. And then I'm also going to give you just a couple things that you can do in the office to further this cause and things that are going to be efficient and generally not too costly and very low risk.
All right, so here's what it comes down to. Why vitamin A, B, and C? Well, vitamin A is basically a derivative of retinol.
You all heard of retinol and retin-A. Vitamin A is a derivative. What does retinol do?
Multitasking. It stimulates collagen. It improves cell turnover. It decreases pigmentation. it all around makes the skin appear younger and the skin get thicker over time.
It even exfoliates a little bit the surface of the skin. So those dead layers of keratin that builds up on the surface, that gets out. So one of the most important... Aspects is retinol, vitamin A. Vitamin B is niacinamide, specifically B3.
What does niacinamide do? I have a video that just went out recently on niacinamide benefits and why it's so important. So I won't go into all the details, but also multitasking.
What does it do? Helps stimulate collagen, helps decrease pigmentation, improves the skin barrier function so skin becomes more hydrated, keeps pollutants out. It's- It's anti-inflammatory, decreases inflammation, calms the skin.
Decreases pore production by decreasing inflammation and the production of oil. Wow. Vitamin A, vitamin B. Vitamin C, topical vitamin C, typically as a serum, what it does is it also stimulates collagen.
Also decreases pigmentation. It brightens the skin, improves hydration. I mean, we're talking about like basically three individual actives that are doing essentially the same thing.
but doing it in different ways. So you're attacking and improving the biochemistry of the cells by three different mechanisms. And that's what gives us the synergy that we keep talking about. So vitamin A, vitamin B, vitamin C are absolute musts in an anti-aging treatment period.
And what makes these things active is you've got to keep in mind everything I'm telling you is it's working at the cellular level. It's turning on the cell that has basically chosen biologically to shut down. and age.
So if you're turning it on, it is super, super important that you keep it on as long as possible. And that's why at the forefront of all this is consistency, right? If you're going to get on this path, know Number one, if you figure out what the right things to do, and this is what this video is helping you to do, find the right things to do and do them consistently, you're going to win.
All right, so vitamin A, B, and C, those are the key pieces of any skincare regimen. Now, here's some bonus. components. Peptides.
Peptides are short chains of amino acids that also turn on the cells to do the things that we want it to do. They signal the cells to turn on collagen, improve hydration, some of them decrease pigmentation. but really at the forefront is the production of collagen. Same thing with the second bonus component, which is growth factors. There's human growth factors, there's plant-based growth factors as well, which we have in our product, in the Illuminate.
Basically, the concept is the same. You're trying to stimulate and increase the production of collagen and help the skin in this active growth phase, right? So vitamin A, B, and C, add peptides, add the growth factors. Now you have... five collagen stimulating components in your skincare routine that are all fighting this downward shift and turning it back over.
I always think about it as like a river, right? It's like the river is rushing towards aging and then you're trying to swim upstream, but now you're with these products, you're kind of like on a motorized boat going upstream and you're able to actually get upstream. So that's really, really the crux and understanding of why these particular five ingredients are so important. And just, and this is not meant to be a... plug, but just to explain how passionate I am and how much I believe in it, all of these particular active ingredients for collagen production are in the trifecta.
Because a lot of you might be thinking, oh God, how am I going to get all of these different aspects into my skincare routine? Well, you know, that was the whole premise of the trifecta to make it super simple to do so. All of them are included in the three steps that are part of the regimen. Now, let's talk about what you can do in the office to continuously build more collagen.
And trust me when I say I'm harping on collagen, but I'm telling you that is the entire anti-aging story. What can you do? You can injure the skin.
with microneedling. Tiny little dots of injury caused by those needles that creates a cascade, tells the skin, hey, we need to heal. How does the skin heal? It heals by collagen, right? So increasing collagen production through microneedling.
Light chemical peels will do the exact same thing. Any type of physical trauma to the skin surface will cause the skin to build more collagen. So these are a couple of basic things that I want you to keep in mind.
If you're going to do something in the office, generally speaking, do something that you can tolerate doing on a regular basis, meaning it's not going to beat up your skin too much. So microneedling is generally safe every three months or so. You can do it a little bit more frequently, but you don't need to. Light chemical peels, same sort of thing.
Very mild chemical peels creates a little bit of injury. causes the skin to do what it needs to do. These are the key aspects of it.
I wouldn't do heavy lasers. I wouldn't do anything that's highly going to burn the skin and all that kind of stuff. Because that's just a lot of trauma for the skin to go through. And over time, it actually wears down the skin in a negative way.
People who get like deep resurfacing under their eyes, five, 10 years later, they're always got these like thin, crepey skin under their eyes, for example. Same thing with the face. You see people with like deep resurfacing, they end up with like the waxy white skin. That's never a great, great look. You want your skin to be moving in the right direction, kind of like what you would do if you're on this beautiful regimen of daily diet and exercise.
Five, 10 years later, your body is just amazing and it keeps moving in that direction. That's the whole idea. Now, we talked about daily things that you can do. This is all skincare component, right?
Vitamin A, B, and C, peptides, growth factor, supplement and augment. If you've got really kind of thinner, more crepey skin, supplement with some of these treatments in the office. Do not forget to do your neck.
Neck is skin. skin just like everywhere else. You want to make sure you treat your neck and your eyelid skin exactly the same. That's a very, very important thing.
You don't necessarily need a whole other eye cream or neck cream. All the things you use on your face should be able to be used on the skin of the face and neck. That was another one of the things that we engineered the trifecta to allow to do. Also, sun protection. You're going to do all this stuff.
Trust me when I say this, you want to make sure that you're protecting your skin against the sun. Now, don't tell me that vitamin D conversion is the reason why you should be getting full. full-blown sun on your face because you can get it on your torso, you can get it on your body and convert all the vitamin D you need very, very simply with not a lot of facial exposure at all. But if you're going to expose your face to the sun, trust me when I say that you're going to start to see collagen breakdown at a rate that's nearly greater than anything you can do in terms of building up with the products and the treatments that we talked about.
So sun protection is probably step one and most important aspect of all. all of this stuff. So keep that absolutely in mind.
So taking all of this into consideration, that's your collagen production story. Now I'm just going to throw out a couple bonus points here. Things that are going to help plump up your skin, hyaluronic acid. That's a very beautiful and important component because it's like a sponge.
It goes into the skin and it creates a situation where it draws water and the skin gets plump and supple and immediately you start to see changes. So for you that like instant gratification, you You wanna have hyaluronic acid at least included in your products or as a separate serum. Again, it's included in the trifecta. You also wanna do something that is bringing oil to the skin. Believe it or not, even if you have oily skin, you wanna increase the oil that you're getting to the skin because that decreases the amount of oil that your skin produces.
As a result, what ends up happening is the pores don't get overworked and they don't get clogged and you have less noticeable pores. Finally, pigmentation. pigmentation.
And I think I mentioned that those three individual vitamin A, B, and C helps with pigmentation, but that rounds out the story because there are things like licorice root extract. There's a number of other botanical lighteners that you use. In addition, if you have problems with pigmentation, the big three that I just mentioned, in addition to some of these other non-hydroquinone-based lighteners can all together work in beautiful synergy to help your skin be even toned and decrease pigmentation. presentation production. So folks, I hope that puts it into nice perspective and you get an idea of the concept of multitasking, the idea of combination therapy and approaches, and really the logic of having lots of different things working in your benefit, in your favor.
If you do it the right way, you combine it with sun protection, you will literally defy skin aging. Can't do anything about sagging. Can't do anything about volume loss. You're going to have to come to see me for those things. But the skin is a hundred percent on.
you, you can absolutely do it. And that's why I've become so passionate about the notion of it, because I can obviously only operate on so many people each month, but I can certainly help a lot more people achieve their skin anti-aging benefits by informing them, educating them, and even providing products that will do that effectively and efficiently. All right, folks, I hope that gave you some beautiful perspective on the A, B, and Cs of good skincare. If you enjoyed this video, please subscribe if you haven't already.
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All right. Hope you enjoyed it. Watch more Skin School videos.
to get more background and information on different topics that are related to your skin. All right. Thanks so much, Dr. Amir Karam.