Why Women Over 60 Who Use CeraVe, Nivea or Sol de Janeiro Still Have Crepey Arms (It’s Not Their Age)
There is a photo from the lake last July. Four grandkids in swimsuits, my husband in his fishing hat, and me in a long cardigan. It was 91 degrees.
I know exactly why I wore it. When I reach for something, the skin on my forearms folds up like tissue paper. Above the elbow it hangs in fine little pleats.
I’m 64. I don’t expect to look 40. I just wanted to stop doing the math every morning about which sleeves would cover what.
So I did what most of us do. I bought a better cream. Then a better one. Then the one everybody on Facebook swears by.
$8, then $19, then $48.
First the Nivea cocoa butter. The big gold jar, $7.98. It smelled like my mother’s bathroom and I loved it.
Then CeraVe, $18.96, because it says “developed with dermatologists” right on the tub and my doctor’s office had it on the counter.
Then Sol de Janeiro, $48, because my daughter-in-law uses it and the jar says firms and tightens.
Every one did the same thing. Soft at nine in the morning. By dinner, the crepe was back, and my arms felt tight again in the shower.
I went back and read the reviews of all three. Thousands of five stars, most of them about the smell. On the expensive one, the same line kept coming up about the tightening. People simply didn’t see it.
“I had a whole basket of half-used jars under my sink. Cocoa butter, the blue and white one, a fancy one my sister gave me. Same story every time. Nice for an hour, then nothing.”
Brenda K. · 67 · Knoxville, TN
★★★★★
The answer came from a place I didn’t expect. My annual skin check.
“Turn them around.”
Dee has been a dermatology nurse for thirty-one years. She was checking a mole on my shoulder when I made a joke about my “paper arms.”
She asked what I was putting on them. I listed all three. She smiled the way you smile at somebody who has been sold something.
“Go home and turn them around,” she said. “Read me the first word on each one.”
Water. Water. Water.
The $8 jar and the $48 jar start exactly the same way. Most body creams are around seventy percent water. You need emulsifiers to hold it together with a little oil, and then fragrance on top.
Water is the cheapest ingredient on earth. It fills a big jar, it feels rich when you scoop it, and it makes the price per ounce look fair. That is why it is first on almost every jar in the drugstore.
That still didn’t explain why it stopped working on me. Dee explained that part with a pen.
It isn’t your age. It’s the oil your skin stopped making.
She drew it on the back of my paperwork. The top layer of your skin is like a brick wall. The bricks are skin cells. The mortar holding them together is oil your own skin makes.
That mortar is mostly two things: a kind of natural wax, and an oil called squalene. As long as the mortar is thick, the water inside your skin stays inside.
After menopause, the glands that make that oil slow way down. The mortar thins. Older skin also repairs itself slowly. In one study, older skin had rebuilt only about 15 percent of its barrier a full day after damage. Younger skin had rebuilt about half.
Now picture putting a cream that is mostly water onto a wall with gaps in the mortar.
The water sits on top. It evaporates within the hour. On thin, dry skin, it can pull some of your own moisture up and out with it on the way. That is the soft-at-nine, crepe-by-dinner feeling.
That is why the price never mattered. All three jars were trying to fix a missing-oil problem by adding water.
“My whole life I had oily skin. My mother too. Then after 55, my arms and hands went dry and crinkly almost overnight. Nobody ever told me it was the oil that left, not the water.”
Maricel D. · 63 · Daly City, CA
★★★★★
Put the oil back, not more water →
So what puts the mortar back? Dee’s answer came from the driest place in America.
The plant that lives on almost no water.
In the Sonoran Desert outside Tucson, summer days pass 110 degrees and it can go months without rain. One shrub stays gray-green the whole time. Jojoba.
Its seeds hold something unusual. Not an oil, exactly, but a liquid wax. It is the closest match found in nature to the wax your own skin makes.
The O’odham people of the Sonoran Desert were rubbing it into their skin and hair long before any drugstore existed. It was hiding in plain sight the whole time.
The second piece is squalane, the stable form of the squalene your oil glands used to make. Put the two together and you are putting back the two things your mortar was made of.
Some formulas add rice bran oil, the oil Japanese women have used on their skin for centuries. That combination is what Dee called a Desert-Wax lipid blend.
So why isn’t it in my jars? Wax costs far more than water. You cannot fill a 16-ounce tub with it for $7.98.
“I live in Mesa. Lotion was gone off my skin before I got to the car. Week two on the oil, I noticed my forearms still felt soft at night. Week five, I wore a tank top to the grocery store.”
Judy P. · 71 · Mesa, AZ
★★★★★
Then she told me the part that matters most. When you put it on.
The three-minute rule.
Dee’s rule is the same one skin doctors give eczema patients. You have about three minutes after the shower.
Pat yourself with the towel. Don’t rub. Leave the skin a little damp. Then press the oil in, right away, while the shower water is still sitting in your skin.
That is the one time water helps you. It is already in your skin, and the oil goes on top and keeps it there. Wait ten minutes and it has already gone into the air.
Start the three-minute rule tonight →
I didn’t want to go buy five separate oils and mix them in my kitchen. Dee told me the name of what she uses.
What’s in my bathroom now.
It is a body oil with no water in it at all. Jojoba is near the top of the list, with squalane and rice bran oil right behind it, plus wakame, Brazil nut, passionflower and Japanese camellia.
It is a dry oil, so it sinks in fast. I put my nightgown on about a minute later and nothing sticks. It smells faintly of vanilla, not like a dessert.
Here is what it won’t do. It won’t make 64 look 40, and it won’t touch sun spots. What it does is put the mortar back where the water kept leaving.
See today’s price on the one I use →
What changed, and when.
Night one, the tight feeling I always got by bedtime wasn’t there. That surprised me more than anything.
Week one, I noticed I hadn’t opened a jar of cream. I didn’t need to.
Week three, I reached for the coffee mugs on the top shelf and looked at my forearm on purpose. The tissue-paper folds were softer and flatter.
Week six, the reader photo below is close to what I saw on my own arm.
“I was the one paying $48 for the orange jar. I smelled great and my arms looked the same. Six weeks on the oil after the shower, my granddaughter asked to take a picture of my arm. That has never happened.”
Gloria R. · 66 · Houston, TX
★★★★★
Thanksgiving was the real test.
I wore the sleeveless navy blouse I bought three years ago and never wore. Nobody said a word about my arms. That was the point.
“The three minutes is the secret. I keep the bottle on the towel rack so I can’t forget. My hands stopped looking older than my face around week four.”
Teresita V. · 69 · Las Vegas, NV
★★★★★
Try it for 90 days, bottles open →
Start with three bottles, not one.
One bottle is about thirty days. The real change shows up between week three and week six, and keeps going after.
The pricing surprised me. One bottle is $49.90. Three bottles are $69.90, because the third one is free. That is $23.30 a bottle.
The orange jar I was buying was $48, and it was mostly water.
The oil I use
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