Resveratrol and Your Skin

Vine Vera pride ourselves on producing high-quality products that make your skin look and feel amazing. We employ a number of key ingredients and techniques to make this possible, and put nothing but the best into our products. A lot goes into Vine Vera's numerous skincare collections, but one thing pretty much every skincare item we make has in common is the special ingredient resveratrol.

There's a good many reasons why we use resveratrol in our products, and how it can benefit you and your skin greatly. Today, we thought it would be good to let you in on why we use resveratrol, and what makes it so great.

Resveratrol's Story

It's long been known that drinking red wine—a glass or two a day—is good for the health, can reduce risk of a wide variety of diseases, and helps one age very gracefully, keeping you looking youthful for ages. Additionally, as Vine Vera has mentioned before, red wine's goodness doesn't stop at general health benefits; drinking red wine can also greatly improve the look and feel of your skin, making it brighter, more radiant, more youthful, softer, and just overall healthier.

Well, it turns out that a good deal of red wine's healthfulness and skincare benefits can be traced to a molecule known as resveratrol, a powerful antioxidant which is present in high amounts in just about every red wine varietal (though concentrations do differ a bit from one red to the next). Given how beneficial red wine can be for the skin, and given that resveratrol is one of the main reasons it's so beneficial, it almost only makes sense to use resveratrol as a skincare ingredient.

What's an Antioxidant?

We've mentioned that resveratrol is a powerful antioxidant just one paragraph ago. You've probably heard the term “antioxidant” tossed around before without really knowing what it means, but even if you're already aware of what antioxidants are and how they work, a refresher never hurts.

An antioxidant is a molecule that reduces oxidative stress on cells by inhibiting the oxidation of various molecules, thereby preventing free radicals from forming. What, exactly, does this mean? Well, chemical reactions called “oxidation reactions” naturally take place inside and in between our body's cells. These reactions produce byproducts known as “free radicals,” particles that can do a great deal of damage to cell structure and even kill off cells entirely that were perfectly well-functioning before. The result of widespread oxidation reactions, if left unchecked, is widespread cell damage, which has a number of worrisome impacts on health, and on the skin level, results in things like the breakdown of collagen, ashy appearance of skin, wrinkles, etc.

So where do antioxidants come in? Well, as a matter of fact, strong antioxidants like resveratrol are able to prevent oxidation reactions from ever happening at all, meaning no free radicals are released, and cells aren't damaged. Your entire body is made up of cells, and while you have enough that losing some isn't a big deal and happens normally, preventing widespread damage and destruction of cells is generally a good thing, and it certainly shows on your skin.