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Fight aging without surgery
Forget Botox or microdermabrasion. B. Kamins creator, Ben Kaminsky, shares his simple secrets on how women can look years younger without a trip to the surgeon's office.
By Kat Tancock
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EC: Of your seven steps, which do you think is the most important and why?
BK: Super saturate and radiate. Both of these sections explain what happens to your skin, and also give you a heads-up as to which ingredients to look for. The book follows strategies which will allow your skin to be good for a long period of time.
EC: You say moisturizing and avoiding the sun are most important?
BK: Moisturizing is extremely important. Sun avoidance is extremely important.
EC: What about winter skin? This is one thing Canadian women have to deal with, not just the cold air outside but the dry indoor air for heating. What do you recommend for that?
BK: If you don't have a good relative humidity in the air you can use a room humidifier. You can use preparations that are more appropriate during the winter -- Urea is a material which is what we call a natural moisturizing material. You can make preparations with urea, with lactic acid and sodium hyaluronate, which is also something that as you get older your skin doesn't make. These are beautiful preparations. We also use something we developed in our labs called Bio-Maple -- it's a maple isolate -- it draws water from the air into your skin.
EC: So if I'm going to the drugstore and it's winter, and my skin's getting dry because of that, what ingredients should I look for? Urea is one?
BK: Look for urea, look for lactic acid, look for petrolatum. Look for preparations which contain ceramides, preparations which contain cholesterol, and preparations which contain long-chain fatty acids, which resemble our natural skin oil.
EC: One of the things that I found really interesting in your book was how you recommend moderate exercise rather than "going for the burn," as you call it. Can you speak more on that?
BK: We know from studies that the cardiovascular work that you do and your strength-building exercises are beneficial as far as general health is concerned. The problem, of course, is the intenseness on an ongoing basis where you perspire a lot. And usually your perspiration is there to cool your body down, and there are some dissolved salts in this perspiration. What happens is clients complain of irritation because of salts, so there's a question of when you do perspire, afterwards to get that off your body as quickly as possible, that would be the first point. The second point is that there's a question of whether the intenseness of the exercise itself is all that appropriate for all ages. Certainly if you're young and you're capable of doing this then it's a lot easier on your organ system. If you're older than you really have to get advice to make sure that you're not overdoing it. A lot of exercise usually becomes intensive with weight loss or weight gain and that has a dramatic effect on your skin. If you're overweight and you lose the weight and you don't do it in an appropriate way you can end up with extra tissue, which is not the most attractive feature you can show to the world.
EC: And for women who do exercise regularly, what do you recommend for minimizing the negative effect of sweat on the skin before and after exercising?
BK: The most important thing is to be aware that it's there and to get it off your skin as quickly as possible. You're still taking stuff off your skin which probably your skin needs, so you should really try while your skin is still wet to use the appropriate kind of moisturizing material on your skin to help replace some of the stuff or provide a type of barrier function.
How old is your skin? Take our quiz to find out!
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