Proactive skin care is essential in creating and maintaining, healthy youthful skin. Clear, smooth, glowing skin is a hallmark for beauty. In order to achieve good quality skin, it is important to adopt a holistic, inside-out approach. Unfortunately, not many consumers are familiar with proactive skin care.

As we age, our skin becomes thinner. This makes our skin less durable and more prone to damage. Aging skin also loses its elasticity, thus causing it to sag. But one of the most undesirable effects of aging is wrinkles. Wrinkles commonly appear around the eyes and mouth. Age spots and skin discolorations can also occur as we age.

Proactive skin care is important because it minimizes the effects of aging. Proactive skin care is especially important as the environment toil of urbanization wrecks havoc on our skin. Polluted air, intense sun rays left unchallenged by a depleting ozone and an unhealthy diet are some of the metropolitan factors that affect our skin.

Our skin was not designed to handle such potent man-made challenges. To retain healthy, youthful skin, a proactive skin care regimen is essential.

But not all skin care products are created equal. Before you begin a proactive skin care program, it is imperative to purchase the correct products. Not many consumers are familiar with the ingredients used in producing cosmetic products.

This ignorant mentality is dangerous because using poorly formulated cosmetic products will hurt your skin instead of helping. Some cosmetic products are made with mineral oils, dioxane and chemical fragrances; ingredients that could have a long-term adverse effect on your skin.

Using these products might give you skin problems instead of preventing them; an ironic twist for consumers using these products as proactive skin care measures. Some of these ingredients can clog your pores and suffocate your skin while others may even cause cancer when used in large amounts over long periods of time.

When you develop a proactive skin care regiment, you should look for quality skin care products that were specially formulated with nutrient-rich ingredients that are safe to use. Collagen is one such example. Collagen is a naturally occurring protein that is made by our bodies. Collagen maintains our skin elasticity. By using collagen formulated products, you increase the elasticity of your skin, thus giving you taunt, smooth skin. Elastin is another protein that is essential in the maintenance of firm skin.

There are many products on the market that offer these ingredients in their products. Unfortunately, some of these products contain a minuscule amount of these important ingredients. Before you start building your proactive skin care war chest, you look for products contain a reasonable amount of these important ingredients.

If you want to save your skin from being touched by the abrasive hands of time, you should consider implementing a pro active skin care regiment. Plastic surgery may seem like the 'be-all', 'end-all' solution to physical imperfection. However, it is extremely expensive and has several risks associated with it. If you want to have healthy, youthful skin, start using well-formulated products in your proactive skin care regiment.