While your skin benefits from many different vitamins and antioxidants, vitamin E is one of the more important. You already know that you can get vitamin E through your diet and by taking it as a supplement. But because it's an antioxidant, and it plays a critical role in keeping your skin safe from environmental damage, there are a couple of other ways you need to use it.
First, as an antioxidant, vitamin E helps defend your skin from the sun. It soaks up ultraviolet light, helping to keep free radicals from damaging your skin. While it can't absorb all types of UV rays — it's most effective against light in the UVB spectrum — it does provide an additional layer of protection when used in conjunction with a UVA defense. So it's a good idea to combine vitamin E with vitamin C. This combination makes vitamin E even more effective against UV damage, whether you take the vitamins orally or apply them topically. They've been shown to work together to decrease sunburn, DNA damage, and skin pigmentation after UV exposure.
What's more, when you take vitamin E orally, the vitamin C helps keep vitamin E stable, so it's more able to continue its antioxidant activity.
Vitamin E also works as an anti-inflammatory. If you forget to apply it prior to UV exposure, it can still help in the healing process by reducing skin swelling. It can also be effective to help with chronic inflammatory skin conditions, especially when you take it in conjunction with vitamin C or with vitamin D.
Combining vitamin E with vitamin C and vitamin D has other benefits as well. Scientists are looking at vitamin E's ability to improve skin water-binding capacity. What they've found so far indicates the vitamin E could be useful as a moisturizing agent and to protect your skin from free radical damage caused by pollution.
Because of these many benefits, it's a good idea to use vitamin E topically in addition to taking it orally. The unesterified form seems to be the most consistently effective for topical application. This form is the most similar to natural sources of the vitamin. If you want to keep your skin safe from damaging UV rays and the stresses of inflammation, make sure your skin care treatments combine both vitamin E and vitamin C. Système 41's Restorative Night Treatment and Day Crème both contain vitamin E and vitamin C and can clearly help you protect your skin from the elements.
To your health, naturally,
Janet Zand
Sources:
http://lpi.oregonstate.edu/infocenter/skin/vitaminE/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24656410 Nutrition: The future of melanoma prevention?