Beginners skin science
November 11th, 2019 by Dr. Hannah Sivak
Never apply an essential oil directly to your skin! They are powerful chemicals, powerful enough to dissolve plastic and kill your skin cells. The very volatile molecules in essential oils reach the olfactory bulbs in our noses giving us great pleasure. Essential oils are extracted from a variety of plants and contain the volatile chemicals that can be evaporated by distillation, although sometimes they are pressed directly from leaves and fruit peel. The high price of some flower essential oils is due to the very low yield, i.e. many pounds of plant material need to be treated to get just a few drops of essential oil. Essential oils are a…
November 11th, 2019 by Dr. Hannah Sivak
No. Hair is dead protein, there are no live cells that can produce (or use) energy. This does not mean that you can’t do something for your hair. 1) Wash. Why? Because we like to smell nice and look nice! Not washing your hair will not make it stay longer or grow faster, and it will look horrible. Try, however, to avoid fragrances and strong detergents, because they will irritate your scalp and affect the quality of the hair the scalp is making. 2) Condition. Yes, hair is made of protein (not live cells) but it will look and feel nicer if you neutralize all those electric charges with a…
November 9th, 2019 by Dr. Hannah Sivak
Thank you to all of you who came to my class today. I am sorry that the conditions were inadequate (and that I was losing my voice), but I hope you will take the time to come to our websites, mine and Skin Actives’ and learn more about skin care and what we do. Rachel, Susan and Dustin will be there tomorrow, Saturday, so go and visit them at the Skin Actives booth, number V05. I promised you to post the presentation and here it is! Ask me questions and I will answer them. Hannah
October 27th, 2019 by Dr. Hannah Sivak
Because it contains essential fatty acids. But, you may ask, what is an essential fatty acid? Essential fatty acids are, like essential amino acids and vitamins, chemicals we need for life but do not have the ability to make ourselves. For this reason, they must be in our diet and, for the skin they must be applied topically. Why can’t we make those very important fatty acids ourselves? During evolution we lost the enzymes required to make them. Just like we can’t make vitamin C (L-ascorbic acid). Unless you ingest ascorbic acid (in a vitamin pill or orange juice), you get very sick!. Why do we need essential fatty acids?…
October 24th, 2019 by Dr. Hannah Sivak
Because you don’t want to have the very thin skin that “old” old people have. Healthy skin protects our bodies from water loss, oxidants in the air and infection, and it feels better and more comfortable! Figure. The Madonna dell’Impanatta by Raphael shows you the difference in appearance between young and old skin. Old skin will be unable to protect your body as well as young skin does. There is stuff we cannot change and stuff we can change, so it is important that we learn what good skin care products can do for us. For that, please have a look at Skin Actives. Using run-of-the-mill skin care, even if…
October 22nd, 2019 by Dr. Hannah Sivak
Why do you need healthy skin? Why do you need young skin? For many people, their face and the age their face projects to the world, will determine whether they get a particular job or whether they get to the second date. We may not like it, but it’s a fact. How we look is important. Even for those of us who don’t go out much, our skin is incredibly important. If your life is good and you want to keep living it into your 90’s, healthy skin will make an enormous difference. The paper-thin skin of the very old cannot do its job properly – keeping infectious agents out, keeping water in, etc., and it feels uncomfortable. There’s no…
October 22nd, 2019 by Dr. Hannah Sivak
Because glutathione protects your skin from strong oxidants! Glutathione is one of the peptides that matter, and a lot. Glutathione is present in us and in most living beings for good reasons. Glutathione helps us cope with life at 21% oxygen (what we do have in the atmosphere). Respiring oxygen allows us get the most energy out of our food but it carries a price: Reactive Oxygen Species (ROS*), What are ROS*? Reactive oxygen containing molecules that are so desperate for electrons that will take them from anything and everything. There goes your DNA, your proteins, your lipids (vital for cell life) etc. In top of the ROS* we produce…
October 21st, 2019 by Dr. Hannah Sivak
Do you trust advertising implicitly? I don’t. You shouldn’t. And if you don’t, you must be able to understand what’s in that jar for which you are ready to pay $100 or more. The ingredient list on the jar, bottle or box tells you what your skin care product is made of. Are you paying for water? Are you paying 10 times as much as you should? Do you want to learn how to translate it to plain English? The ingredient lists on the labels of skin care products look, at first sight, practically undecipherable, and probably just the same at second sight. And yet, it is possible to understand what’s…
October 21st, 2019 by Dr. Hannah Sivak
You and I buy a skin care product because we want to be prettier, solve a skin problem, and/or slow down (or reverse) skin aging. As a rule, we read the seller’s advertisement to decide whether the product will do its job. Don’t! That is a sure way to get disappointed. Why? Because most advertisements lie or are written by people who don’t know enough. I want to help you learn how to find a product that will fulfill your expectations and I will publish posts that will help you achieve this objective. First, I will explain how a skin care product is made. Second, I will explain how to…