Let’s cut to the chase: Can skincare hoist up your cheekbones, rearrange your bone structure, and have your skin defying gravity? No.
Can certain ingredients make skin look noticeably firmer, smoother, bouncier, and as a result, lifted? Yes.
Lifting skincare is less about pushing and pulling your skin back and more about hard-working, high-performance ingredients that plump, cushion, and firm.
Why Does Skin Start To Look Less Lifted?
Before we frisk into the world of lifting skincare, let’s recap why your skin can begin to look a bit less lifted and a bit crepey in the first place.
As we age (or stress, travel, forgetting sunscreen, etc. etc.), a few things happen.
First, collagen and elastin decline—leading to a loss of structural support and elasticity in the skin. Plus, hyaluronic acid decreases as you age as well, dropping around 10% with each decade. Less hyaluronic acid in the skin means less internal hydration, meaning your skin loses its plumpness and bounce, and fine lines grow more pronounced. This combination can lead to skin laxity (ie. that droopy, less tight look)
What Does Skincare Mean By Lifted?
Essentially, lifting skincare influences the way your skin looks, feels, and holds hydration.
Lifting Skincare Hydrates
Hydration tends to be the quickest, easiest hack to improving the overall appearance of your skin. When our skin’s dehydrated, it tends to look blah: dull, deflated, and with more pronounced fine lines.
When skin cells absorb water, they swell. This helps reduce the depth of fine lines and smooths surface texture. Ingredients like hyaluronic acid, glycerin, glycols, and ceramides work to replenish the skin's moisture levels at different depths. For both instant plumpness and longer-lasting moisture retention.
When skin has been thoroughly hydrated, fine lines will look softer and the skin looks fuller, so light reflects more evenly across the skin.
Lifting Skincare Smooths
In most skincare that claims to be lifting, you’ll likely spy some form of ‘peptides’ in the list of ingredients. These are short chains of amino acids that act as messengers in the skin, triggering skin cells (fibroblasts) to produce more collagen, elastin, and structural proteins. Through this process, peptides help soften lines across your face to boost tightness and firmness.
Plus! Peptides are also known to enhance the skin's barrier function, which improves moisture retention to help keep your skin hydrated.
Lifting Skincare Refines
As I said, lifting is mostly visual—and as any budding artist will tell you, nothing affects visuals more than light.
By smoothing your skin and minimising the look of lines (aka. shadows that exaggerate droopiness), light can be more evenly reflected across your face. And that optical refinement tends to read as firmness.
Ingredients like ceramides help restore cranky skin and improve barrier function to prevent transepidermal water loss. This helps the skin maintain better hydration, relieving any uneven texture that can scatter light.
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