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Posted by on Mar 2, 2017 in TellMeWhy |

What Makes Wrinkles?

What Makes Wrinkles?

What Makes Wrinkles? Just as clothes hang in folds when they are old and have been stretched and washed a lot, so does the skin. The skin ages in five different ways. Some of these begin when you are child, others at puberty and others after middle age.

The five symptoms of skin aging are: Loss of electricity; changes in nerve endings which take place from early childhood; a tendency for the apocrine sweat glands which developed at puberty to disappear (old people sweat less); changes in the coloring matter in skin; causing blotchy patches on the backs of old people’s hands and darker freckles; and changes in the skin of the scalp. (This is quite thick when the person is a child, gets thicker and then goes relatively thin with age.)

A wrinkle, also known as a rhytide, is a fold, ridge or crease in the skin or on fabric. Skin wrinkles typically appear as a result of aging processes such as glycation, habitual sleeping positions, loss of body mass, or temporarily, as the result of prolonged immersion in water. Age wrinkling in the skin is promoted by habitual facial expressions, aging, sun damage, smoking, poor hydration, and various other factors.

Development of facial wrinkles is a kind of fibrosis of the skin. Misrepair-accumulation aging theory suggests that wrinkles develop from incorrect repairs of injured elastic fibers and collagen fibers. Repeated extensions and compressions of the skin cause repeated injuries of extracellular fibers in derma. During the repairing process, some of the broken elastic fibers and collagen fibers are not regenerated and restored but replaced by altered fibers.

When an elastic fiber is broken in an extended state, it may be replaced by a “long” collagen fiber. Accumulation of “long” collagen fibers makes part of the skin looser and stiffer, and as a consequence, a big fold of skin appears. When a “long” collagen is broken in a compressed state, it may be replaced by a “short” collagen fiber. The “shorter” collagen fibers will restrict the extension of “longer” fibers, and make the “long” fibers in a folding state permanently. A small fold, namely a permanent wrinkle, then appears.

Content for this question contributed by Casandra Purther, resident of La Verne, Los Angeles County, California, USA