We live in an age where it is absolutely impossible to go anywhere or do anything without getting inundated with advertisements and information about how to best take care of yourself. Everything from what you eat, to what you wash yourself with, to what you should do for your skin in hopes that you can make yourself look younger. Today I would like to discuss the benefits of combining coconut oil and skin care. More specifically, using coconut oil as an antioxidant.

Antioxidants

First, lets discuss antioxidants and why they are essential to your health. The prefix "anti" means that we are dealing with something that fights against something else. In this case, we are introducing something to our bodies to fight oxidants, or oxidation. Skin care is one of many ways coconut oil as an antioxidant can be used.

Oxidation

Oxidation is a word that is being thrown around a lot in nutrition and health circles nowadays. Basically what we are talking about is the process of cells becoming damaged, either from aging, or from being broken down due to some form of malnutrition at the cellular level. These broken down cells are also known as free radicals. The end result of this in terms of your skin, is that you experience anything from dry skin to liver spots. Coconut oil and skin care go hand in hand in more ways than one, but what about your current products?

What Are You Using?

Do the products that you currently use help with the issue of oxidation and free radical damage? The main ingredient in all skin moisturizers is water. This is wonderful in a cream meant to reduce wrinkles and help dry skin. It absorbs directly into the skin, which is also water dominant in composition, and causes the skin cells to expand. This causes the skin to look healthy and the wrinkles disappear. The problem of course is that as soon as the water evaporates, or is taken into the blood stream, the skin goes right back to looking wrinkled and feeling dry.

Strike one for traditional skin care products. Coconut oil as an antioxidant is still on the table, but first lets talk about the other ingredients in your cabinet. So we have water so far, a temporary help that isn't quite what we want, but some help is better than no help. So aside from the water, the lotion will have some sort of oil in it. Here is where you are going to really have to look closely. Some lotions, especially if you got it at a healthy store of some sort will actually have coconut oil in it.

The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly

Even the big companies that are putting out products can't ignore that coconut oil and skin care are very compatible. Other ingredients might include shea butter, or almond oil, but the most common ingredient is vegetable oil in some form or another. This is incredibly unfortunate and you should avoid any and all lotions, or for that matter any skin or hair care product that has vegetable oil in it. Why is this the case?

The answer here is simple. Vegetable oil creates free radicals in your cells when applied to the skin! This is due to the great amount of processing that is involved in producing vegetable oils. The issue is not that vegetables in their natural state don't have antioxidant properties, the issue is that the production of it strips it of all it's antioxidant power. This, when applied to the skin, actually penetrates, and creates an environment that is very prone to increases in free radical damage.

I don't know about you, but this seems to me to be the exact opposite of what we are hoping our skin care products will achieve for us. Again, more free radicals will result in your skin aging even faster! More wrinkles and more liver spots. So lets actually talk about coconut oil and skin care.

Coconut Oil As An Antioxidant

The most important aspect of combining coconut oil and skin care is the properties of coconut oil as an antioxidant. Coconut oil does several things for us, one, it actually reduces our bodies need for vitamin E to a certain extent. Vitamin E is one of the main antioxidants that the body makes use of and is very necessary that we get enough of it. Further than this, coconut oil as an antioxidant actually helps the body to repair already damaged cells. This means that combining coconut oil and skin care actually serves a dual purpose, where using most other skin care products at most just provides a temporary illusion of helping.

Conclusion

So what can you expect from combining coconut oil and skin care? To put it bluntly, you can expect every promise you have ever heard in a skin care advertisement. Using coconut oil as an antioxidant will not only provide you with luscious feeling skin, but it will also help to prevent the formation of things like wrinkles and liver spots. If you already have these types of skin issues, combining coconut oil and skin care will actually help to repair this damage where other products might only work to disguise it.

Coconut oil and skin care are such a wonderful paring that it's almost a wonder that anything else exists. Using coconut oil as an antioxidant will help you to enjoy young, glowing skin for many years to come.