The neck is a real giveaway of ageing because the skin on the neck is really thin and has very few oil glands, so it gets dry very, very quickly. It doesn’t help that we are always stretching and
twisting our necks, which obviously you need to be able to do, but stretching and twisting pulls the skin about a bit so it gets drier, thinner and wrinklier quicker than the skin on the face as we get older. The big question is, what can you do about it? Well, we should all have been wearing sunscreen on our necks for the last 20 years!
Obviously you can’t do anything about that now but what you CAN do is start wearing suncream now and wear moisturiser, too. Moisturiser will help plump up the skin cells, and sunscreen on top of that every day will prevent damage immediately, and also in the future, and will keep pigmentation patches down.
If you want to move on to tweakments for the neck, you could try things such as Profhilo, the injectible moisture jab, or Volite or Restylane skin boosters which work in a similar way. These are all brilliant on the neck because they provide a layer of fluid gel under the surface so that the skin is hydrated from within. Having that gel in place stimulates the growth of new collagen and elastin.
When I have tried it, I have found that that the treatment takes a bit longer to take effect on the neck than it does on the face but it gives a nice result. If you have a ‘stringy’ neck, that happens because the bands of muscle in the neck, the platysma, are too tight. You can have a small amount of Botox injected in them, to soften the overactive muscles.
And as for the jawline, what I like along the jawline is a bit of Ultherapy, that’s a focused ultrasound skin tightening treatment. Then, possibly also some light treatments like the LED red light therapy, which is really gentle and good at helping the skin to remodel itself from the inside.