Understanding Age Spots

As you get older, you probably don’t want your skin to belie your age. You can maintain a healthy diet and exercise regularly to help your body look younger, but your skin will inevitably become wrinkly, and perhaps you’ll develop an age spot or two. As their name implies, age spots can quickly make your skin look older.

Cause of Age Spots

One major problem with age spots, also called liver spots because of their color, is that they tend to appear in our most visible areas of skin: hands, arms, shoulders, face, and chest. This is because it is exposure to sunlight that causes age spots. Sunlight is composed of both UVA and UVB rays. UVB cannot penetrate very deeply, but UVA rays can go through glass and light clothing. Therefore, our skin is constantly bombarded with these UVA rays, even when we think we’re hiding behind the tinted glass of our car windows.

This translates to our skin having to work overtime to protect us from the harmful rays of the sun. The cells responsible for creating the pigment, or melanin, are called melanocytes. They emit melanin that leads to tans and age spots. With age spots, melanocytes let out an overabundance of melanin in one spot, leading to an area of hyperpigmentation