You have been told that drinking too much alcohol makes you look older faster. Now this is not just a warning from others who don’t want you to enjoy yourself. It actually is the truth. One of the negative things that happens to your body when you drink alcohol is that it will dehydrates you. When you drink alcohol, you actually pee out more liquid than you have ingested. This process results in dehydration and although your entire body is affected with this self-inflicted dehydration, your skin especially suffers, rapidly causing you to make you look older faster.
“Alcohol is actually one of the worst, most aggressive compounds to destroy your skin,” says New York nutritionist Jairo Rodrigue. If you value your smooth skin, perhaps you should hesitate before taking that next drink. Reducing or eliminating your alcohol consumption is a good thing for your overall health and especially if you care about the skin you are in.
Alcohol Based Hand Sanitizers–Too Much of a Good Thing?
But even as you determine to change some of your night-out refreshments, consider that small tube of pleasantly scented hand sanitizer you use several times a day. Most hand sanitizers are alcohol based. While you are not injecting the alcohol, now that you know better, but you are still rubbing the stuff on your hands several times a day, or is it or like is it like several times an hour? While you are not ingesting your hand sanitizer, you are rather giving your beautiful smooth looking and feeling hands the same poison that will dry them out resulting in premature wrinkling, cracking and even peeling skin on your hands.
This use/overuse of alcohol hand sanitizers, especially those containing a minimum of 60% alcohol that has been overwhelmingly encouraged by governmental agencies throughout the world, has not addressed the potentially harmful side effects of this substance.
Not only are you drying out your hands and making them look old as you rub on the gel, you are also making your skin wrinkled, chapped, rough and broken.
When Hand Sanitizers Hurt
But while you strive to protect yourself from a dreaded disease, and the application of your protection hurts… it is time for you to pay attention.
C.S Lewis once said that “Pain is God’s megaphone”. If every application of your alcohol gel is making you wince, you need to pay attention. Since your skin is the first organ of defense, to protect the rest of your body, with the skin barrier is broken, germs can freely enter your body, despite the application of your hand sanitizer.
According to Dr. Scott Bolhack, hand alcohol-based sanitizers are toxic to wounds — those tiny cuts on your chapped hands, because of the ingredient you bought it for initially–the alcohol. Alcohol kills bacteria, but it also kills the good healthy cells and interferes with the healing process. Those tiny cracks in your red chapped hands are not a simple annoyance to brush off, rather they are something to be concerned enough to correct. With every tiny cut in your hand, your skin barrier has been compromised, and allows thousands of harmful germs to enter your body, which can give rise to more serious problems.
If you want to keep your skin looking youthful, and your body healthy, seek to avoid alcohol, both inside and outside of your body and reach for a non-alcohol alternative for germ-free hands.