Feel Like Your Face Aged Overnight? You're Not Imagining It

Johanna is sharing a conversation from the unPAUSED podcast where Dr. Mary Claire Haver sits down with Dr. Tony Youn — board certified plastic surgeon, bestselling author of Younger for Life, and the most followed plastic surgeon on social media. They cover something most doctors have never connected for their patients: what estrogen is actually doing to the skin, and why menopause changes everything. If your skincare has stopped working and you can't figure out why, this episode explains it.

🤩unPAUSED with Dr. Mary Claire Haver — Dr. Tony Youn 

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/unpaused-with-dr-mary-claire-haver/id1846701533?i=1000768527827

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:06

Swingin' through the ears with regulars. Midlife's calling honey Where nobody's full. Got that fire side where I'm enough to shine. This is our time, yeah. But feeling so divine. Oh, thriving, with you, driven, fold and free. Women own in midlife. Just you wait and see. Dance through the changes with a heart so strong. This is our anthem.

SPEAKER_00 0:38

Come and sing along. Hello, my friends. Welcome back to Not Your Mother's Mid Live. I'm your host, Joanna, and today we're talking about skin. Specifically, the skin on your face. When you wake up, one morning I feel like you aged overnight, and it is not in your imagination. I'm going to be sharing a conversation that I listened to from the Unpaused podcast with Dr. Mary Claire Haver. She was sitting down with Tony Yoon. He's a board-certified plastic surgeon, best-selling author of Younger for Life and the most followed plastic surgeon on social media. That's how I found him. I found him on, I think it was either Facebook or Instagram, and I started following him, and he's really interesting. And then I started following his podcast as well. But my two favorite podcasts got together. Dr. Mary Claire Haver, as you know, I've spoken in previous episodes, is a gynecologist, obstetrician, and she specializes in women's hormonal health. So yeah, it was a really interesting episode. Um the man that she's talking to, Dr. Tony Yoon, the man knows his stuff and he knows how to explain it in a way that actually makes sense. And this conversation is a good example of that. The question they're digging into is one that most doctors have never connected for their patients. But what is estrogen actually doing to your skin? And what happens when it drops? Because these two conversations, hormones and skin health, almost never happen in the same room. Your GP talks about one, or your gynecologist talks about one, and your dermatologist talks about the other, and nobody really joins the dots together. Dr. Yoon opens the conversation with a statistic. Women lose 30% of their collagen thickness in the first five years after menopause. 30%. And then continue losing collagen at twice the rate of men for every year after that. So it's not just a one-time drop. The rate of loss stays accelerated. That's a significant amount of change happening in a short window of time. But men lose their collagen slower, so that's why we ask when we look like we age faster than the men in our life. Estrogen interacts directly with the fibroblasts in the skin, the cells responsible for producing collagen and elastin. The two things that keep skin firm and structured. When estrogen drops, fibroblast activity drops with it. Less production, less collagen, and the structural scaffolding of the skin starts to thin out. He also covers what declining estrogen does to hyalonic acid. Hyaluronic acid. I find that word so hard to say. The thing responsible for keeping skin hydrated and plump. You know, we've all seen the hyaluronic acid that's been added to our moisturizers now, or you can just get the serum to add to your skin that plumps up your skin. Well, it's already in your skin. That's what's responsible for keeping it hydrated and plump, like I just said. And estrogen helps regulate the hyaluronic acid production in the skin. So when you have less estrogen, you have less hyaluronic acid, less water retention, which is why so many women in perimenopause and menopause notice their skin feeling drier or looking duller and just don't as plumped up. And why products that used to work before seem to stop working. But that last part is worth saying clearly. Your skincare hasn't stopped working, but the skin it's working on has changed. So it's not the products, it's you. It's like breaking up with somebody. It's not you, it's me. Whatever. I don't know what I'm trying to say. Those are two different problems. And knowing that makes a real difference to how you approach it. Dr. Yoon isn't trying to alarm anyone here. It's not a scary podcast to listen to. He's just connecting the dots that should have been connected a long time ago. Understanding why something is happening means that you can make actual decisions rather than spending more money on more products and hoping one of them sticks. The link to the full episode is in the show notes as usual. And I'd just like to say thank you for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, share it with a friend who'd love it too. Drop your thoughts or ideas for future episodes. I'd love to hear from you. Subscribe, subscribe, subscribe to my podcast and my YouTube channel so you'll never miss an episode or a video over there on YouTube. Leave me as me a five-star review to help others find me easier and for my podcast to grow. I really appreciate that. And until next week, I'm Joanna, and this is not your mother's made live. Bye bye.