Daylight Savings time is coming!

With only one sleep deprived night to adjust, Monday morning on the 8th is going to be brutal. You and all your friends will be reaching for your under-eye creams to be looking bright and full of pluck. 

Skin Actives is here to help with a weekend on our selection of caffeine for under eyes creams and a history lesson about Daylight Savings time and what it means!

Coffee's for Closers

Coffee is fun. You can tell because it’s everywhere and people are willing to queue up for it and pay huge margins for it. While coffee tastes great on its own, there is really no question that the source of its popularity comes from the stimulating drug that is found as part of its chemical makeup.

Michael Pollan in his latest audiobook, “Caffeine” describes the drug in question as remarkably “transparent.”

It’s an apt description, isn’t it?

It helps us get a fix on our feelings about caffeine. Where so many other drugs are notable for their side-effects and the way that they distort our perception of the world around us, caffeine when we consume it, makes us feel very much like ourselves. In fact, for many, we don’t feel fully, completely ourselves until we’ve had our daily dose of caffeine.

The chemical has become so ubiquitous that it’s entered daily life in many forms, from traditional black coffee, to tea, to so-called “energy drinks” to breath mints and gum. Folklorically, it is said that it is more difficult to ween yourself off of caffeine than say cigarettes, simply for the fact that caffeine is taken for granted, as a staple of modern life and is therefore ubiquitous and encountered almost anywhere.

Caffeine For Eyes

So while a pot of coffee or a cup of tea might make us feel a lot better right when we wake up in the morning, there are other ways to get your caffeine, and other observable benefits you can get from it as well. 

Let’s hear from our founder, Dr. Hannah Sivak:

"Topical application of caffeine is safe, in fact, they use it to facilitate breathing of newborns. Other beneficial effects of caffeine are analgesia, antiviral, antidermatitis, antioxidant.

This is why you will find caffeine in our unique UV repair cream.

But, beware! Caffeine also decreases the thickness of the subcutaneous fat layer by inducing lipolysis, so while it may be a good idea to treat ‘cellulite’ with caffeine, women who lose subcutaneous fat from their faces as they age, should be careful using it.

The “de-puffing” effect of caffeine may be mediated by the promotion of sodium export from the cell, which is followed by water loss.”

At Skin Actives, we use caffeine in a number of our products, but especially in two of our top-shelf eye creams. Our caffeine is sourced from green tea however, not from delicious coffee. Why? Let’s find out from Dr. Sivak.

“Why use caffeine from green tea?

The answer’s not “because it’s natural”. 

It doesn’t matter whether caffeine is synthetic or natural, what matters is the chemical structure, and it's identical whether it comes from a lab or from green tea. But when it’s from green tea, it comes with many chemicals that the tea leaves make.

The polyphenols in green tea are responsible for some of its remarkable medicinal properties. For instance EGCG is also an effective antioxidant, and scavenging of radicals could be another mechanism for its antioxidant properties.”

But all that having been said, we happen to know that when it comes to beverages, Dr. Sivak is a big fan of glorious coffee in many of its glorious forms. If you’d like to learn more about the science of skincare directly from Dr. Sivak, check out her personal blog here.

Eye Creams For Daylight Savings

With Daylight Savings coming right up next week, you still have time to order some eye cream for those weary days ahead. Skin Actives offers three to give your skin a caffeinated boost!

Triple Correction Eye Cream - With caffeine to perk up your eyes, Triple Correction Eye Cream follows up with other powerful antioxidants as well as epidermal growth factor for cellular turnover and hydrolyzed collagen for collagen renewal! 

Eye Cream with ROS BioNet™ and Apocynin - Even more antioxidants fortify our Advanced Ageless eye cream. Perfect for reversing signs of aging on more well worn skin.

Ultimate De-Puff Eye Serum - With caffeine at number 3 on the ingredient list, you won’t be lacking for perk! Soothing gel-like texture works together with active ingredients to soften inflammation.

Daylight Savings Time History

Now, here in sunny Arizona we don’t make too much of a deal out of Daylight Savings. It’s not something we have here. It seems strange because in this day and age where Daylight Savings is subjected to annual debate, Arizona feels weirdly ahead of the times by putting this agrarian tradition aside.

Were you aware that Benjamin Franklin was an early proponent of Daylight Savings in a satirical article he wrote for a French journal in which he recommended a tax on candlesticks! It really goes to show how much the world has changed in a relatively short period of time.

Daylight Savings was invented to help ease the strain on the lives of farmers. As far back as Ancient Rome, different styles of clocks have been used to tell time a bit differently during the summer months as opposed to the winter.

But winter is on its way again and it’s time to reset the clocks once more. We hope that it’s not too distressing for you this year, Skin Actives Family!

Meanwhile, thanks for joining us for another edition of the Skin Actives blog. Next week we have some great new messages for you, from the launch of a new product, to Season of Giving, part II! See you then, and have a great weekend!