Effective Moisturizer Ingredients

What to Look For in Effective Moisturizer Skin Creams

Moisturizers don’t just make dry skin feel nicer. They provide a temporary support system to fill in for lost collagen and elastin, as well as help to repair the skin’s own moisture retention capacity. Also, keeping the skin plumped with moisture slows the progression and deepening of wrinkles.

When choosing a moisturizer for your dry skin, look for one that contains both emollients and water binding agents.

Emollients are lubricating ingredients that make the skin feel silky to the touch.

Water binding agents, also known as Natural Moisturizing Factors or NMFs, are ingredients that not only bind water to the outer layer of dry skin, but also work to repair the external skin matrix. NMFs do this by loosening dry, hardened cells to expose their water binding sites thereby enabling the skin to retain water as nature intended.

They are so-named because they are part of the skin’snatural moisturizing system.

The list of proven and safe emollients is long and includes: silicone, lanolin and other animal oils, shea butter, cocoa butter, petrolatum, mineral and plant oils, cholesterol, stearates, myristates, palmitates and triglycerides.

Water binding agents to look for are: collagen, elastin, hyaluronic acid (a.k.a. sodium hyalurate, sodium hyaluronate or trademarked variants such as Avon’s Bo-Hylurox) and other glycosaminoglycans, urea, glycerin, glycogen, glucose, fructose, sucrose, polysaccharides, amino acids, cholesterol, lipids, ceramides and lecithin.

Urea has been prescribed by doctors for many years to treat atopic eczema and ichthyosis. It is broadly recognized to be a very effective NMF. Another NMF, hyaluronic acid (a.k.a. cyclic hydroxy acid), has recently been incorporated into skin moisturizers. Hyaluronic acid looks extremely promising since it binds 1000 times its own weight in water.

Read Hyaluronic Acid to learn more about its health benefits.

This article is for informational purposes only. It does not purport to offer medical advice.

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