Why Everyone Needs Vitamin A in Their Skincare Routine

What is Vitamin A?

Vitamin A is a very important and powerful antioxidant. It has many roles within the body, including maintaining healthy skin, vision, teeth, bones and soft tissue, as well as being required for the normal functioning of the immune system.

Vitamin A has super-star skin benefits and helps maintain clear, youthful, glowing skin. A simple way to remember how Vitamin A helps the skin: ‘A is for Ageing and Acne.’

Why Do I Need to Use Vitamin A?

Vitamin A is an essential ingredient in any skincare program that is targeted at correcting skin dysfunctions such as acne, pigmentation and ageing skin.

As a skincare ingredient, Vitamin A is extremely intelligent. It can facilitate communication between skin cells, encouraging them to behave and function correctly. As a teenager, our cells can renew too quickly, causing breakouts and congestion; as we age, they can slow down and cause dull, wrinkled skin. Added to that, at any point in time environment factors can damage our cells.

That is where Vitamin A is essential. By correcting the way the skin cells function, it is able to correct the damaged DNA of the cell and tell it to instead act like healthy young undamaged cells. So smart! This results in an increase of healthy skin cells which replace damaged ones, and normalising skin cell turnover.

A for Anti-Ageing!

As Vitamin A is a smaller molecule, it is capable of travelling to the lower layers of the skin, stimulating collagen and elastin to reduce the depth of wrinkles. As we age, our skin thickness decreases which means the skin loses its youthful bounce. Vitamin A assists with creating more ‘sponge’ within the deeper layers, by strengthening the skin and encouraging a more youthful-looking complexion.

When my Skin is not Doing What it’s Meant to Do

We call this a dysfunction skin: not because it’s naughty, but because it just needs some help in the right direction. A dysfunction skin can show as anything from premature ageing to inflammation, acne, eczema or pigmentation. As outlined above, Vitamin A allows a type of communication to occur between cells, where the cell is told to function normally to help regulate skin dysfunctions and restore balance as new skin is regenerated.

It sounds kind of crazy, but it’s science! Vitamin A fights pigmentation in the skin, is perfect for acne (being oil soluble it penetrates into the pores), provides anti-inflammatory benefits, supports collagen, increases levels of Vitamin C in the cells (more about Vitamin C later), improves capillary stability AND helps to heal wounds, producing new cell tissue with optimum cellular function. Phew! What a little legend.

How Do I Choose a Good Vitamin A Product for My Skin?

Vitamin A should be used before bed in your nighttime skin routine, and always wearing sunscreen during the day is essential. Skincare products containing Vitamin A are powerful, so we recommend the following products as they are gentle with their delivery system yet super effective. 

Our Top Picks for Vitamin A Products