Laser technique shows women's skin ages faster than men's

Oct 4 2006

According to German researchers women's skin ages faster than men's - so men become distinguished women just look older!

The German team discovered this by using a new laser-based technique to measure damage from sun exposure and aging.

The technique involves shining pulses of infrared laser light on the skin to look at the deeper layers of the skin allowing the measurement of the amount of damage from sun exposure and measure aging.

Collagen emits blue light and elastin green, allowing the researchers to measure the relative amounts of each.

According to the researchers from Germany's Freidrich Schiller University in Jena and the Fraunhofer Institute of Biomedical Technology in St. Ingbert, the imaging they saw of collagen and elastin, whose degeneration causes wrinkles and loss of smoothness, illustrated that women lose collagen faster than men.

Collagens are a group of proteins in the dermis, the connective tissue layer of the skin, and are responsible for the strength of skin.

Though the human body makes a lot of collagen in youth, production declines with aging.

Currently, dermatologists who want to examine a patient's collagen network in the dermis have to remove a sample of tissue and look at it under a microscope and study co-author Johannes Koehler, says researchers would like to measure changes in collagen content over time.

The new technique, avoids damaging the first skin layer and the researchers suggest it could someday help analyze skin diseases that affect collagen and even test anti-aging cosmetic products.

The study is published in the journal Optics Letters.