We know that external aggressors such as pollution and harmful UV rays can age our skin.  But did you know that your skin will still age, even without these factors?

In an interview with The Philippine Daily Inquirer, Dr Joseph Chang, Chief Scientific Officer at Nu Skin, said that an enzyme called Arnox which is found to be active in aging skin is an internal source of ageing.

But the company also found that it is possible to block the enzyme from being active.

Its collaboration with LifeGen Technologies, a genomics company that aims to discover the genetic basis of the ageing process, and Stanford University, where researchers are
focusing on profiling expression to identify key groups of genes that influence how we age helped it to discover a group of genes, named the Youth Gene Clusters, which can influence the body's ageing process in three ways:

1) The body creates non-functional cells, which interfere with the body's normal cellular processes even though they are useless on their own. This leads to a deterioration of the body's normal processes.

2) Cellular damage to the body's healthy DNA leads to accelerated cell death. As older bodies cannot generate cells quickly enough to compensate for the loss of these cells, it shows up as ageing, which is most visible on our skin. The older we get, the thinner our skin becomes.

3) Ageing involves the cellular decrease of our natural oxidative enzymes. This makes our antioxidant defences less efficient with age.

Find out how you can train your skin to look younger.