Smoking makes you look older

Even if you look younger than you are, you shouldn’t forget regular care for your body. Here are the simplest tips you are to follow to maintain youthful look for ages.

Drink more water

This is a vexed question if it’s really necessary to drink eight glasses water a day. But the fact is obvious – our skin consists of water by 90 percent. If your organism is short of water, your skin can become dry and sensitive. Water also removes toxins from the organism. Otherwise they come out through our pores, forming pimples and spots. Water humidifies, vivifies, cleans and oxidizes skin. It also reduces pigment spots and makes wide pores smaller.

Choose proper food

There are no special products or drinks promising an eternal youth, but antioxidants help us to restore skin and to struggle against free radicals. Antioxidants protect us from the signs of aging, which are by-products of pollution, smoke and UV-rays. Fruits and vegetables with a bright colour and green tea are great sources of antioxidants. Pay attention to vitamin C as well – it’s necessary for collagen production. Collagen is a structural protein making skin smooth and elastic.

Quit smoking

It’s incontestable that smoking makes your face age faster. So if you want to look younger and fresher you should immediately stop smoking. Cigarette smoke contains more than 4000 toxins and many of them get directly into your blood flow and are transported by blood right to your skin. Besides when you inhale smoke, your lungs produce more than a billion of free radicals that do harm to the whole organism. Smoking influences blood vessels in the upper layers of the skin, what makes your blood produce less oxygen and collagen. At last, slow circulation of the blood is the reason of a thin skin of the smoker and early signs of aging.

Avoid stress

Long stress has always an effect to your face, causing tension, lines and wrinkles that can hide your true age. Maybe it sounds like a cliché but if you feel good you look good. It’s very important to find a time for relaxation. Give a treat to yourself with bubble baths, face masks and spa-procedures. All this gives a powerful psychological support and inspires you with conciliation and harmony.

Jane Fonda - dazzling mature beauty

Nowadays the situation becomes more complicated because we have an opportunity to delay physical signs of aging, at least the most evident of them. Active exercises help us to strengthen flabby hips and belly, moisturizing milk makes our hands and feet softer. Besides, we can’t forget plastic surgery doing miracles: baggy skin below the eyes and double chin disappear as if with a wave of a magic wand. The fact is beyond any doubt – we don’t look the way our mothers did when they were forty years old. But our ability to look young at a mature age actually turns to reality the myth that woman is as good as beautiful she looks. It’s called Jane Fonda effect.

Jane Fonda has brought healthy life-style and youthful look into fashion. Watching Hollywood stars on TV we hold our breath – they roll in luxury, favoring us with a perfect smile on their everlastingly young faces. They serve as an example of how splendid one man can look at the mature age and we start thinking that we should also look well. And soon it turns to another cultural purpose. It seizes a strong hold on our minds and causes the contradictory situation, when the distinctions on the scale of age become smoothed and obliterated. But at the same time we continue to believe, that a woman with wrinkles on her face, pigment spots on hands and gray hair looses her allure and grace, at least a part of herself.

Actually, the things shouldn’t go this way. The middle of life can be the time of a great spiritual growth, because it’s time when we look in the mirror and ask: “What have I achieved and what am going to do?”

Aging makes you sad, doesn't it?

You surely do, anyhow if you still aren’t forty. Forty years is a turning point of woman’s life. When you turn forty, you start realizing that the half of your life is behind.

The fear of this number is a fear of aging. The approaching of the fortieth anniversary usually makes you feel doomed and confused, you often get into a sullen mood. But sometimes, when you finely attain this age, you understand that everything isn’t so terrible and you like being a forty years old woman. Painful waiting is behind and you breathe with relief, because you didn’t start looking different or feel different. It seems funny how you could be so afraid of this date.

But still, what are the roots of this fear? Unfortunately, the cultural imperative determines our value according to our appearance, what makes women so sensitive to the physical signs of aging. Notwithstanding that women can be great surgeons, politicians, psychiatrists and scientists, the majority of us still consider, that our value depends on how we look like and not on what we are able to do.

You're always young in the eyes of your children!

Women are inclined to equate beauty with sexuality. That is if aging makes our beauty fade, then it diminishes our sexual appeal. If we don’t look sexy enough, we can’t attract sexual partners. If we don’t have a partner, we won’t have children and won’t realize our predestination. Finally, if we don’t realize our predestination, there is no use of us. But does the value of a woman lie in her ability to give birth to a child? Certainly, it doesn’t. Still the fear of aging is rooted exactly in such rules. The aging means for a woman nothing but a “humiliating process of sexual disqualification”.

But if your kids are grown-up and your loving husband is always near to support you, is there any sense of being afraid of the aging process? If you look like a kind careful mother and wife in the eyes of your near relations? If you do, it doesn’t mean that it’s not necessarily for you to care for your face and body. It just means there’s no use to pursue a perfect ageless appearance you used to see on TV. Your value is how much light you have inside to brighten those gloomy autumn days of you life.

Mature woman or senescent woman?

Once you notice that your eyes no longer shine as bright as they used to when you were younger. Examining your face in the mirror you can see a lot of vertical wrinkles that you’ve never pay attention to before. And when did those freckles on your hands appear? You may wonder, how a woman that you see in the mirror resembles your mother.

You feel afraid and depressed at the understanding that the youth slips by, the life is half lived and you turn to a woman of ” the certain age ” as French say. This is the moment of realization that you begin to age. The moment, when you captiously peer into yourself and start meditating upon the years left behind: “What did I do until now? “, “Where do I go? “, “What do I want to do in the rest of my life? “. But it’s also the time when you can occupy yourself entirely with your own development and finally do the things that you used to put off till tomorrow.

But when does it happen? Some women begin to feel old and reckon themselves in middle age when they aren’t forty yet. The others start thinking they aren’t young anymore attaining forty years. There are also women feeling youthful after fifty years. And though we usually consider that the transition from the youth to the mature age happens in the middle of our life, it occurs to everyone differently.

Do you know, how often do the women, who haven’t even yet celebrated their thirtieth birthday, look for wrinkles and baggy skin below the eyes? They want to make sure that they have no physical signs of aging and look young. Because the most of us judge the end of youth and the beginning of aging exactly over the appearance of physical changes. No one wants to meet the middle of life with a net of wrinkles under the eyes, wan skin color, gray hair and flabby breasts and belly. Even if you chef finds you an efficient expert and your husband thinks you’re very attractive and sexy, you can’t pass unnoticed the changes occurring to your body.

It’s time to look into yourself and ask a question: are you a mature woman or an aging woman? Your inner voice will tell how old your soul feels.