At this point, we trust that you’re incredibly diligent with your skincare routine; each step is carefully applied to your face to firm skin and tackle the signs of aging. However, many skin care fans miss applying these effective formulas to a crucial area that tends to age faster: the neck.
What Causes Neck Wrinkles?
If you’ve ever taken a closer look at your neck, you may have already noticed that the skin there is slightly different from the skin on your face. This means signs of aging could show up sooner there!
This area of your body is just as prone to aging due to UV exposure, lifestyle habits, and genetics as the rest. However, there are some factors that cause wrinkles here to appear sooner and form more deeply.
Neck skin is much thinner than the skin on our faces, and has fewer sebum glands. Sebum glands are a part of the skin that produces the natural oils that skin needs to function normally. These two factors mean that neck skin is slightly less capable of holding onto moisture compared to your face, and therefore more prone to wrinkling and creasing.
What Are the Types of Neck Wrinkles?
Another factor that can lead to neck wrinkles is the simple fact that this area of skin moves - a lot. Especially when compared to your face!
Wrinkles caused by frequent movement are called dynamic wrinkles. They occur when skin is repeatedly creased in a certain spot - on the face, common areas of dynamic wrinkles include smile lines and crow’s feet.
On the neck, this looks like horizontal lines across the neck area. These days, it’s referred to as ‘tech neck’ as it’s more and more common due to the extended amounts of time that we spend looking down at our phones.
Dynamic wrinkles like tech neck are much easier to prevent, as we can change our behavior to prevent the repeated actions that cause these wrinkles to manifest.
The other type of wrinkles are called static wrinkles. These are the wrinkles that appear solely due to collagen breakdown in the area, which can happen due to age or exposure to collagen-damaging factors such as UV light and pollution.
On the neck, we often see these appear as ‘turkey neck’, aka the vertical wrinkling and loosening of skin. This type of wrinkle is best prevented and treated with the right skincare that supports healthy collagen levels. Ingredients ideal for managing turkey neck are Retinol, Peptides, and Vitamin C.
Tips for Minimizing Neck Wrinkles
One of the best things that you can do to prevent neck wrinkles from forming as deeply is to bring your skincare routine down to your neck, and even your décolletage! This includes cleanser, toner, exfoliator, serum, masks, and last but not least, sunscreen.
This ensures you’re giving your skin the best chance to defend itself against premature wrinkle formation as well as effectively target any existing neck wrinkles at the same time!
There are also skincare products especially formulated to target the thinner, drier neck area. These formulas are rich in moisturizing and anti-wrinkle ingredients to effectively reduce the look of neck wrinkles over time.
