The BBC are asking if teenagers should use anti-ageing skincare.
The short answer is no.
The long answer is no as well.
Our skin is a remarkable organ that very successfully carries out all the functions that natural selection has picked it for. These range from the important and obvious – like making sure your insides remain inside – to some quite suble ones like maintaining a thin cloak of gas that prevents the skin from getting infected. It also plays a big role in maintaining the body’s temperature at the right level via sweating. It also protects the body from the sun.
Basically the skin is a big contributor to maintaining our health. And it does it from day one straight out of the box. There really is very little that science can do to beat what skin does on its own. And it does all this while being thinner than photocopy paper and more flexible than, well, almost anything. It even fixes itself when it get cuts and stratches.
Sadly it doesn’t stay that way for ever. As we get older its performance tails off. At this stage, there are some things you can do to slow down the inevitable and make the skin perform and feel better than it would do otherwise. You can even make it look a bit better. But all you are doing is keeping it closer to its original form.
When you are young, the skin is already as good as it gets, and anything you put on it is either going to do nothing at all or might even make it worse. I don’t think the risk of the latter is very great – one of the great features of young skin is it is very capable of repairing itself. In fact it is continually regenerating itself, so anything you do to it isn’t likely to last very long. This means that using products intended to stave off the ageing process are going to be a complete waste of money, not just for teenagers but for people in their twenties and thirties as well. We all get dealt a different deck of genetic cards, so it varies a lot from person to person. But most people really only need to think about anti-ageing products from their forties.
There is no benefit to starting early
Although I agree broadly with what the BBC article says, I think as a public service broadcaster they should stear clear of the scaremongering angle. Wasting time and money on products that give you no benefit is enough. Making out that there is some health risk as well isn’t really the case. Crying wolf now will make it harder to get a hearing if something serious needs to be covered in the future.