What is an anti-aging cream?

There are a lot of anti-aging products. People should understand that the major thing that produces what we call aging is the sun - the sun exposure. I tell my patients when they are taking a shower to look at the skin on their face and look at the skin on their thigh. Maybe the skin on the face has wrinkles, and maybe some freckles, and looks a little leathery; the skin on the thigh, however looks smooth. Well they are both of the same age. The difference is the sun exposure. Sun exposure causes virtually all the wrinkling that we call aging. So the greatest anti-aging cream is sunscreen and should be used throughout your life. Obviously people don't do that and they start to get wrinkles later in life. Many of the anti-wrinkle creams or anti-aging creams that are sold over the counter may have some hormones in them or other materials. Many of them just hold the water in the skin, and by doing so the skin swells a little bit so that the wrinkles are less noticeable. There are some other products that contain tretinoin, Retin-A, and those types of products actually build up collagen in the skin. Wrinkling and what we call aging is due to degeneration of the collagen, and this is primarily caused by the sun. But products like the Retin-A and tretinoin products will help to build up that collagen level in the skin, which smoothes the wrinkles out to some extent.

I really encourage patients to talk to their dermatologist about many of the over-the-counter anti-aging products, because quite frankly, many of them don't do much at all. They tend to be very expensive, and medicine is expensive enough as it is without spending it on things that don't scientifically do that much.