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Focus On Health

ABCs of Good Nutrition

Colon Cancer

Teach Hand Washing

Heart Disease

If Your Child is Sick

Teens and Osteoporosis

Healthy Skin

It protects you, literally, from the outside world; it is waterproof, helps to regulate your body temperature, and intercepts bacteria that may harm you. It helps protect you from the rays of the sun by producing the pigment melanin, while manufacturing vitamin D in the presence of ultraviolet light. Your skin grows hairs to help keep you warm, and contains sweat glands that keep you cool and excrete body wastes. It also contains a vast network of nerve endings that provide information about the world around you through the sense of touch.

Taking good care of your skin will ensure it continues to take good care of you.

Keep it Clean
If you want to keep your skin glowing with health, the golden rule is, keep it clean.

How you keep your skin clean is a matter of personal choice. Some people swear by cleansing creams or lotions and others simply wouldn’t feel right unless they had washed themselves thoroughly with soap and water.

Although you have probably heard and read otherwise, it is not necessary to wash your face twice a day with soap or a cleanser. In fact, over-cleaning your skin can result in blemishes. Unless your skin is excessively greasy, all you need do in the morning is splash it with lukewarm water and pat dry.

Of far more importance is cleaning your skin before bed. If you don’t, makeup, pollution and oils can trap bacteria in the pores, causing blemishes.

Be Gentle
Until recently, dermatologists believed that at-home mechanical exfoliation of the skin was beneficial. Rough face cloths, cleansing grains and special exfoliating sponges were promoted as a means of encouraging skin cell renewal.

Now, skin care experts recommend that facial skin be washed only with a mild cleanser and never scrubbed or exfoliated with a mechanical device. Although they agree that exfoliation is beneficial for the facial skin, it should only be performed by a dermatologist or other skin care specialist, to avoid undue irritation and/or damage.

Wear a Sunscreen
Any more than 15 minutes of sunshine a day is bad for the skin. Ultraviolet (UV) light has a profound and detrimental effect on the skin, including premature sagging, wrinkling, the proliferation of raised rough patches called keratoses, age spots and skin cancer.

Damage caused by the sun is cumulative, meaning the skin reflects a lifetime of abuse. If you truly want to retain the skin of your youth as long as possible, you should wear a sunscreen with an SPF of 15 or higher in winter as well as summer.

Two lengths of ultraviolet light reach the surface of the earth - and your skin. These are UVA and UVB light.

UVA light - until recently, believed to be harmless - is a major contributor to skin damage. UVA penetrates deeply, reaching the lower layers of the skin. The intensity of UVA radiation does not vary throughout the day or year in the same way as UVB.

UVB light affects the outer layer of skin, the epidermis, and is the wavelength responsible for sunburns. It is the most intense between the hours of 10:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m. when the sunlight is brightest. UVB light is more intense in the summer months accounting for 70 percent of a person's annual accumulation of UVB.

Ensuring your skin stays as healthy and young-looking as possible is easy if you make the commitment to wearing a broad spectrum sunscreen every day.

Treat Blemishes with Care
Never squeeze a pimple or blackhead! If you do, you’ll likely cause an infection and have more blemishes than you began with. Instead, use a product that has been specially formulated for blemish-prone skin, such as Panoxyl®.

Panoxyl® Antibacterial Acne Creamy Wash, Face Wash, Aquagel, Gel and Cleansing Bar all contain benzoyl peroxide - an antibacterial agent that helps control the bacteria that contribute towards acne breakouts. Panoxyl® Clear Acne Cleansing Gel contains both salicylic acid and triclosan to help prevent/control mild episodes of acne.