Skincare

We are pumped to share one of our favorite stories from Prevention here on FitSugar!

Enjoy these easy food fixes for your most beautiful complexion ever

By Sally Wadyka, Prevention

The path to beautiful skin just might be through your stomach. "When the body is out of balance, one of the first places it reveals itself is the skin," says Ruthie Harper, MD, a board-certified internist in Austin, TX, who specializes in nutritional medicine. "If you're not getting the right nutrients, skin gets cheated out of what it needs for optimal health and beauty." Learn to make the most of your body's skin-stomach connection with these seven food fixes that give you a healthy, glowing complexion while warding off a host of skin conditions.

1. Power Up With Probiotics
When the stomach's natural flora gets out of whack because of stress, infection, or a course of antibiotics, you may experience digestive ills and skin problems such as acne, psoriasis, and eczema, as well as dullness and wrinkles. "If your gut's bacteria balance is unfavorable, the toxic bacteria can leak through microscopic holes in the wall of your gastrointestinal tract and travel throughout your body, including to your skin, causing inflammation that prevents the skin from functioning properly," says Frank Lipman, MD, an integrative physician and director of Eleven Eleven Wellness Center in New York City. The best way is to take a probiotic supplement (available at most health-food stores) or consume fermented foods such as kefir, yogurt, buttermilk, miso, kimchi, and sauerkraut.

Probiotics: Europe’s Best-Kept Health Secret

2. Explore Prebiotics
Prebiotics are undigestible nutrients that stimulate the growth of good bacteria in your gut. To prevent problems, keep your digestive tract populated with good bacteria, which "coat the lining of your gut and help seal it so unwanted substances can no longer leak out and cause irritation," says Whitney Bowe, MD, assistant medical director of cosmetic and laser services at Advanced Dermatology in Ossining, NY. Sources include whole grains, bananas, onions, and garlic.

See more foods that help skin after the break!

>> Fans of Australian beauty brand, Aesop, rejoice. The line — revered for its plant-based ingredients, understated packaging, and aromatic fragrances — is finally easily shoppable stateside via the brand's website, Aesop.com. Available online is the complete product selection — everything from the brand's signature Parsley Seed serums to a New York-themed travel kit
(created in honor of the brand's first US brick-and-mortar location in Nolita) to an APC.-designed fine fabric cleanser.

Also making the site well worth a visit is the brand's NYC Blog, featuring an interactive map curated by Dossier's Skye Parrot. For the project, Parrot tapped 30 in-the-know New Yorkers to share their favorite city locales; jewelry designer Anna Sheffield, Proenza Schouler's art director Alejandro Cardenas, and W's Karin Nelson are among the contributors.

There's probably no better road map to aging than the face. A wrinkle here, a sunspot there — all signs that we're growing up. Let's be real; there's no magic cure for wrinkles and the other effects of aging, but there are preventive measures to take that don't involve fancy creams or weekly visits to the esthetician. Wrinkles, dry skin, and sun spots, all common signs of aging; find out which foods will stop them dead in their tracks. The fountain of youth is just a meal away.

Wrinkles

If someone mentioned that smiling left such an (ever) lasting impression, some of us may have been a little more selective with what we found funny. It seems that no matter what age you are when it happens, wrinkles still have the ability to make you feel, well, old. Keep in mind, aging isn't the only thing that causes wrinkles: smoking, sun damage, and all that squinting, smiling, and frowning also contribute to those little — and sometimes, not-so-little — lines that find a home on our face.
Preventative Foods: Vitamin C serums are huge in the skincare world as a good line of defense against wrinkles. They also come with a hefty price tag. Guess what? Science says, an orange a day keeps the wrinkles away! A study showed that participants who ate a diet high in vitamin C and linoleic acid were less prone to wrinkles. While we're talking fruit, you may want to up your berry intake, too. The antioxidant powerhouses are key in keeping skin free of environmental stress that help contribute to aging.

Learn which foods help with dry skin and sunspots after the break

I'll be honest: I'm not a fan of eating blueberries. Yes, I'm aware of their amazing qualities and powerful antioxidants, but I just never cared for the taste. So consider my reluctance to try Yes To Blueberries Intensive Skin Repair Serum ($20). I was afraid the scent would instantly turn me off, but I was on the hunt for glowing skin, and that's exactly what I got. To find out how it worked, and why you might want to say yes to blueberries, just keep reading.

This shoutout is long overdue--the Total Turnaround Visible Skin Renewer is one your editor's must-have beauty products. To be honest, we often leave the beauty posts to our beauty bloggers, for their knowledge is so impressive that our olive-oil and sunblock beauty routines seem a bit simple in comparison. We've realized, however, that we are not alone in loving this particular Clinique product. We buy mostly everything online but something, time and time again, we forget to purchase in advance is our moisturizer. It seems before we know it we're scraping the bottom of the glass jar and making some time in our day to run to Sephora for an instant replenishment. This happened for the fourth time in a row this week and for the fourth time in a row we dredged all the way over to Sephora only to realize that the moisturizer was sold out. Why we hadn't learned our lesson the first time is another matter completely. From this experience we learned two valuable lessons. One, our mousturizer of choice is acutally a lot of people's moisturizer of choice, and, shopping online takes the cake every time!

The Clinique Total Turnaround Visible Skin Renewer is super light and almost mealy to the touch. It leaves our skin actually glowing with out the sparkles that so many 'glow'-titled moisturizers secretly pack in their bottles. It always gives our skin just the right amount of moisture; never are we oily, never does our face feel dry. Quite frankly, it serves us better than any moisturizer we've ever tried and (our mom and grandmother always said, 'As far as skincare goes, only trust the French') it's from a company that's been with us since our teenage years (boy, did our skin glow back then). Below, the star mousturizer and a few other Clinique products we have scattered about our powder rooms.

We've long been aware that a glass of red wine a day is good for the heart, but we've only just discovered its anti-aging benefits. As if we needed another reason to drink! Network partner Beauty Secrets Revealed informs us that red wine is chock full of key antioxidants, minerals, and something called Reservatrol that keep us, ahem, well-preserved. This cocktail of youth preservers is primarily found in red grapes, blueberries, and cranberries, and its benefits include, "anti-cancer, antiviral, neuroprotective, anti-aging, anti-inflammatory, and cardioprotective effects." So should we be swilling the stuff left and right? After all, heavy drinking isn't exactly a recipe for aging gracefully, as photos of many a washed up old movie star three times rehabbed can attest. According to BSR, just a glass will do ya, so take it easy.

If you want to go beyond just ingesting the stuff, it seems a variety of skincare companies have caught on to the benefits of grapes and berries and offer topical products touting the same benefits. Grapeseed extract can now be found in the products of many organic lines. The most well known of these is Caudalie, a skincare line based entirely on the virtues of the grape. It's practically an institution in France (and we're forever trying to demystify the French woman's certain je ne sais quoi). Back in '93 at a vineyard in Bordeaux, a certain Professor Vercauteren told owners Mathilde and Bertrand Thomas that the grape seeds they were throwing away post-harvest were actually "the most powerful free radical traps in the plant world."

They set to work to stabilize polyphenols (the key antioxidants) to render them effective on the skin, create a whole range of products and eventually open a Vinotherapie Spa, the first of its kind. Subsequent spas followed in Europe, and a stateside version arrived this year, housed in New York's Plaza Hotel. What exactly do the treatments entail? Think lounging in a jacuzzi, slathered in grape residue as your skin soaks up the youth juice, followed by a honey and wine wrap and sipping special teas. We haven't tried it ourselves so we can't tell you whether it works or not, but such a decadent, relaxing retreat would probably take years off our lives.

This innovative use of grapeseed has inspired other companies to explore its anti-aging, anti-inflammatory, and protective properties. Grapeseed extract has now become a key ingredient in the skincare ranges of Origins, Laura Mercier, Dr. Brandt, L'Occitane, and several others. Look for it on your next Sephora binge.