Feed The Skin From Within: Why You Need Skincare Supplements
We’ve been bred and buttered on topical skincare. Cleansing is as much a part of most people’s daily routine as brushing their teeth and people are willing to put time into it because of this. We KNOW the benefits of cleansing; it removes all traces of makeup, oils and debris from our skin and sometimes delivers active ingredients that can improve our skin.
We're here to tell you that regardless of how thorough your topical skincare routine is, if you’re not feeding your skin from within, you’re missing out.
Why you should use skincare supplements
It’s time for the famed sunflower analogy. We all love to look at the top of the sunflower with beautiful, healthy yellow petals. It’s appealing and vibrant. When you touch the top of the flower, it’s like touching the surface of the skin.
When you’re planting the sunflower and hoping that it will be healthy and look fantastic, you take time to consider the soil you’re planting it in and ensure there are plenty of nutrients in it.
You water around the root of the sunflower because you know it needs to be hydrated from the inside out. Imagine if you saw me trying to feed the sunflower just by watering the petals – you’d think there wasn’t much hope that the flower would grow to be healthy.
Taking skincare supplements is feeding your skin from the roots, from the dermis upwards aka the lowest layer of the skin that can’t be directly reached by topical skincare. Skincare supplements feed the skin from within.
Types of skincare supplements
You can find a supplement for anything out there but the reason to choose skincare supplements specifically is that they’re optimised to help the skin through how they’re delivered into the body and the dosage within them.
Key skin supplements
When it comes to the skincare supplement you should be taking, in the end, it comes down to your particular skin concerns.
Omegas
Particularly important for skin hydration especially in those with problems with their skin’s barrier, such as those with eczema or dry/dehydrated skin. Omegas are important for those of you with acne too as it is exacerbated if skin is dehydrated!
The nerdie recommendation: Advanced Nutrition Programme SkinOmegas+ (€36.00 for a month supply)
Vitamin A
Vitamin A is the king of skincare ingredients, both topically and internally, as it is essential for the function of skin cells and in the end, they’re what determine what your skin looks and behaves like. Everyone should be taking vitamin A supplements (unless pregnant or breast-feeding)!
The nerdie recommendation: Advanced Nutrition Programme Skin Vit A+ (€25.50 for a 2 month supply), Advanced Nutrition Programme Skin Accumax (vitamin A spot-fighting supplement, €90.00 for 120 capsules or 1-2 month supply)
Vitamin C
We don’t make vitamin C ourselves so it’s super important that we make sure we’re getting enough as it aids in the strength of blood vessels (no more broken capillaries), preventing pigmentation and making collagen.
The nerdie recommendation: Advanced Nutrition Programme Skin Vit C (€19.00 for 60 capsules, 1-2 month supply, 500mg of vit C per capsule), Altrient C Liposomal Vitamin Supplement (€48.00 for 30 sachets, 1 month supply, 1000mg of vit C per sachet)
Probiotics
Probiotic supplements benefit everyone and the drinkable supermarket ones are essentially more sugar than good strains of bacteria. Taking probiotics aids in our digestion and improve absorption of other supplements - woop woop!
The nerdie recommendation: ZENii Probiotics (€40.00 for 60 capsules, 1-2 month supply), Advanced Nutrition Programme Probiotics (€22.00 for 75g of probiotic powder, 1 month to 6 week supply)
Do supplements not just make “expensive wee”?
The reason that we need to supplement is because when it comes to key skin nutrients such as vitamin A, omegas and vitamin C, we simply don’t get enough through diet to get the optimal daily amount even though we may hit the recommended daily allowance (which aim is to stop us from getting scurvy). Hate to break it to you but even if you’re eating a tank worth of fish for your omegas per week, pure liver twice a week for your vitamin A and glugging back freshly squeezed orange juice all day long, plenty of things have an effect on how we absorb nutrients.
Poor gut bacteria, alcohol, caffeine and smoking (or vaping… any form of tobacco product) can affect how you absorb nutrients. Good quality supplements are designed to actually get to where they need to go without being damaged or depleted. You only excrete out that which you can't use. Supplements ensure that you have the maximum amount you can use in the first place!
Collagen supplements – are they worth it?
Many say that our body can’t do a lot with the collagen we get from collagen supplements. On the contrary, when we ingest (hydrolysed) collagen, it’s believed that it tricks the rest of the body to think it should be trying to heal and so it prompts the skin to create more collagen. That’s the only type of bare-faced trickery I abide by!
The body needs more than this to make collagen anyway. I think it’s much more worth it to take a well-rounded collagen anti-ageing supplement, like IMAGE Skincare’s Yana Collagen Supplement (€99.00 for a month's supply), which contains hydrolysed collagen, an antioxidant complex, vitamin C and more.
Another option that we stock is ZENii ProCollagen (€40.00 for a month's supply) which also contains hydrolysed marine collagen alongside vitamin C.