Dr. Greg Hillebrand studies the science behind our aging skin: exactly what causes our wrinkles, sags and age spots and what we can do about them. He insists that FOF women can repair damaged skin and that anti-aging creams can help--if you know what to look for.

• FOF: What makes one person's skin appear to age faster than another's?
  • Dr. Hillebrand: Some people do age more slowly than others, because they are genetically gifted with beautiful skin--their parents had great skin. Or they may have certain favorable genetic attributes, for example, darkly pigmented people tend to age more slowly than light-skinned people. And some people simply take better care of their skin than other people.
• Q: Can you do anything about your genetics?
  • A: Not really, but you can take better care of your skin by protecting it from environmental damage. Every dermatologist would agree that chronic sun exposure is the number one factor in aging skin. Sun damage causes your collagen and elastin to break down--a big reason for sagging skin. Skin sagging is also caused when you repeatedly gain and lose weight.
• Q: Once you're in your 50s or 60s, and you've already damaged your skin from sun exposure or weight changes, can you do anything to fix it, or is it too late?
  • A: Everybody, regardless of where they're at today, has the potential to be better. If you put us all on a scale of 1 to 5 for skin quality, with five being the worst, I believe everyone has the ability to improve at least one grade. But you have to be realistic; if I'm a five, I'm not likely going to get to a one. Dermatologists and plastic surgeons can offer procedures that might help you move two grades or more.
• Q: So there are improvements that require surgery?
  • A: Surgical methods can help with things like excess, sagging skin. But other conditions, such as dis-pigmentation and fine lines, can be better handled with topicals.
• Q: What causes wrinkles?
  
  • That’s a question I’ve been working on for quite some time. At the fundamental level, wrinkles are caused by the repeated compression of your skin through muscle contraction during facial expression—smiling, frowning, things like that. The skin buckles and forms a crease. Eventually, those creases etch into your skin so you can see them all the time, even when you are not smiling or frowning. Just like if you were to buy a smooth leather glove and wear it day after day to garden; it would start to get creases in the folds.
• Q: Does that mean that people who never smile--and there are a few out there--will get fewer wrinkles than people who are happy and smile a lot?
  • A: Yes, that's correct. In fact we just published a paper on this subject. But does that mean you should never smile? Absolutely not. I mean, who's more attractive, a smiling woman with wrinkles, or a woman who never smiles with no wrinkles? As we go into our 50s and 60s... my God, you're going to have crows feet. It's okay. I meet a lot of very hot women over 50 with crow's feet.
• Q: I love that. How old are you?
  • A: 53.
• Q: So can a topical make any difference with those wrinkles?
  • A: Here's the good news. Using skin care products like Olay's Pro-X will help strengthen your skin to withstand the daily mechanical stress of flexing helping to reverse the appearance of wrinkles. Yes, over time, your skin will wrinkle, but it will wrinkle later and to a lesser extent.
• Q: How exactly does it strengthen the skin?
  • It helps protect and stimulate the collagen. Collagen provides the skin with its mechanical robustness. The better your collagen, the more resilient your skin will be. Collagen is found in the dermis—the lowest layer of skin. This layer doesn't constantly renew itself like the top epidermal layer. That's why you have to start taking care of it as early as possible.
• Q: How does Pro-X protect the collagen?
  • A: We have several tools that stimulate the skin to help it synthesize new collagen, such as Niacinamide. It's the real backbone of many of the technologies in the Olay line.
• Q: So even if you're older, and your collagen has lost some of it's strength, niacinimide can help revive it?
  • A: Well, you're basically stimulating new collagen to help support the broken collagen.
• Q: Cause you can't make that go away?
  • A: Yeah. Trying to change the collagen, or elastin, which has already broken is really difficult. Anybody who tells you they can do that--I'd be asking a lot more questions.
• Q: But can a topical product actually penetrate to the deep levels of the skin?
  • A: Yes. Some do. They actually penetrate directly through the top layer, through the epidermis, and get to the cells in the dermis to stimulate them directly.
• Q: It just does it by absorption?
  • A: It does it by absorption. Conversely there are topicals that can cause the cells to stop synthesizing collagen. Things like corticosteroids or steroids. If I apply those repetitively for a long period of time my skin will get thinner and that's bad. So I know that if I can turn collagen synthesis off with a steroid, I can also stimulate it and turn it on with other agents.
• Q: How do I know which of the topicals I'm buying are going to help my collagen?
  • A: That's a good question. Some companies in the cosmetics industry will make all kinds of claims about what a product does based on nothing more than a theory. Only a few companies actually put their products through the rigorous and expensive clinical testing that's needed to prove their products do what they claim to do. I’m particularly proud to work for one of those companies. We can point to clinical studies designed and overseen by dermatologists and published in peer-reviewed journals to prove that our products do work. One particular clinical study, just published in the British Journal of Dermatology, showed that our regimen of Age Repair Lotion, Wrinkle Smoothing Cream and Deep Wrinkle Treatment was actually better than the gold standard prescription product Renova at eight weeks of treatment.
  • So to answer your question, when you're picking a product, ask questions. Like, where is the data that shows that this stuff actually works?