African American skin care is most often overlooked, yet is still very important. It can be a great challenge since it is influenced by some variables such as geography, eating habits and the level of skin darkness. Dark skin has more melanin than light skin. For this reason African Americans are better equipped to cope with the sun than Caucasians and other ethnic groups. With that said, black skin care must not be neglected.
Let’s take a little side trip and talk about melanin. It’s a skin pigment that gives color to your skin. If you see a light-skinned person with freckles, what you are seeing is someone with little spots of melanin. A freckle is created by small concentration of melanin. When you get tanned by the sun, what is actually happening is that the sun triggers melanocytes which are cells in your skin to create more melanin. The melanin moves to the outer layer of skin and creates a darker skin color.
Having more melanin in ones body is a benefit, but definitely not a reason to neglect African American skin care. Sure, it blocks the powerful sun rays better than sun block. It also aids in slowing down the marking of time on the skin and that is why people with dark skin look younger than those with light skin. Nevertheless, melanin is the biggest factor affecting water loss in the skin. The darker the skin, the more water it loses and thus the skin becomes less elastic. Different studies of babies determined that the water loss starts in an early age, making black skin care vital even at youth.
While skin comes in dry, normal, and oily regardless of the color or level of melanin, there are some fundamental differences in the skin’s ability to protect itself. The extra melanin creates a barrier to the skin that protects it but at the same time, it also makes it very difficult to have a skin care treatment penetrate deep into the skin. This means that you might need heavier oil as the base of the skin care treatment so that it can treat the skin and yet not be too oily. In other words, your skin does not need more oil quite as much as it needs oil that can work into the layers of your skin. In short, smaller molecules.
Fortunately, there is emerging technology that addresses just this problem of producing exact ingredients with small molecules for greater penetration of the skin. The bad news is that only the very high end product lines have yet to utilize this technology, which means higher prices.
Black skin care is different from other skin care. African American skin care is different from one person to the other, according to skin type. Dark skin has its pluses and minuses and like any other skin type, it needs the aid and pampering treatment of skin care. Find out what kind of skin care treatment is right for your skin and make sure that it is designed for deep penetration.
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Tags: advice, African American Skin Care, beauty, chemical peels, day spas, estheticians, facials, health, masks, Skin Care, tips, toner, treatments






April 4th, 2009 at 11:39 pm
I totally agree with the information in the article and would go even further to suggest that newbie estheticians focus their attention on melanated skin to truly learn their craft. Because esthetic school is always taught from a european perspective it is incumbent upon an esthy to educate herself on all types of skin. What I personally discovered was that once I had mastered my own skin, Asian, Latino and East Indian, the peculiarties of White skin became quite simple. This is what I impress upon my students in my workshops and it serves them well.