I’m aboard certified dermatologist and in this article, we’re going to be talking about the skin benefits of melatonin.
Contents
What Is Melatonin?
What the heck is melatonin is a hormone that controls our circadian rhythm, our sleep-wake cycle, our day-night cycle, and seasonal biorhythms. There’s a good chance you’ve heard of melatonin because it is really popular in a variety of over-the-counter sleep AIDS, melatonin gummies, and supplements to help you fall asleep.
And these can also be utilized by people who work swing shifts and have disruptions in their sleep-wake cycle. Or if you’ve been experiencing jet lag after a recent journey, it can kind of help you get back on track.
What else does it do? It’s really vital for executing immune responses to infectious organisms. It’s important for fighting off cancer. It has anti-tumor effects, it helps modulate our weight and it’s important in our reproduction. Melatonin is an antioxidant, and for this reason, it is attractive for its antiaging potential.
What Does Melatonin Do For Skin?
Melatonin is present in a really high concentration in a variety of tissues throughout the body like bile, ovaries, and lymphocytes, which are a type of cell in the immune system. And it’s present in high concentrations on the skin. Within our skin, there’s something called mass MAS, the melatinergic antioxidant system. I mentioned at the beginning of this article that melatonin is an antioxidant. What is an antioxidant?
Well, antioxidants are present in our skin to help fight off oxidative stress. When we go out in the world, we’re exposed to a lot of stressors, ultraviolet radiation first and foremost, as well as visible light and pollution. And these things lead to the formation of oxygen-free radicals that damage the fats in our skin, the collagen in our skin, and the DNA in our skin cells.
Also Read:
Top 10 Best Fat Burning Fast Ways
10 Best Face Moisturizers For Clear Skin And All Skin Types
Top 5 Detailed Night Skincare Routine | Sharing Skin Transforming Tips
10 SECRETS How To Look Younger Than Your Age
But our skin is equipped with something called antioxidants that can help sort of mop up these things before they go damaging our skin. Melatonin by itself directly scavenges free radicals and reduces oxidative stress.
Its chemical structure actually allows it to handle a variety of different forms of free radicals. But melatonin also indirectly fights off free radicals by increasing the levels of antioxidative enzymes in the skin, things like superoxide dismutase as well as catalase. So these enzymes get a boost from melatonin and then they go on to fight off free radicals.
Importantly, melatonin is shown to result in a boosting of these enzymes that are sustained for a period of about 24 hours. Now, because of its broad range of antioxidant and radical scavenging abilities, melatonin is key in biting off oxidative stress from UV damage.
In fact, clinical studies demonstrate a reduction in skin damage upon exposure to UV when melatonin has been applied topically. Prior to UV exposure, when you go out and your skin is exposed to the stone or you sit by a window and UVA rays come in through window glass as soon as it hits your skin, those free radicals are generated immediately.
So you need to have the antioxidants on board prior to exposure. Upon exposure, the antioxidants that are naturally present in our skin, decline. So putting an antioxidant on topically before being exposed to UV is one way to help minimize the overall burden of damage from exposure to UV, as well as a variety of other environmental stressors.
As a side note, this is one of the reasons why smoking tobacco and drinking alcohol in excess lead to more visible and more prominent and early onset signs of photoaging. Because tobacco smoking, as well as drinking alcohol in excess, drains your skin of its antioxidant systems. It puts a tremendous burden on those.
So there’s really not much left to deal with the damage from ultraviolet radiation, pollution, visible light, and other environmental stressors. This is why people who smoke have lower skin levels of vitamin C, which is another antioxidant.
Melatonin Versus Vitamin C
Over the years, I’ve covered a lot of different antioxidants in skincare products. So what makes melatonin an attractive option? Well, it offers a variety of benefits over some other antioxidants on the market, specifically vitamin C. That is the one. Vitamin C is an antioxidant that everybody and their mother is always craving and lusting after. It is coveted.
But I think people often ignore some other antioxidants that may potentially offer some benefits over vitamin C. And in the case of melatonin, there are a few benefits. First of all, its ability to handle free radicals is better than vitamin C. And by that I mean its reduction potential is greater than the reduction potential of vitamin C as an antioxidant.
So it’s better at handling free radicals than vitamin C. Another advantage of melatonin over vitamin C is that it is lipophilic, meaning it loves fatty things, so it can diffuse across the stratum corneum and down actually into the dermis and within the hair follicle. Whereas vitamin C, ascorbic acid, is water soluble and difficult for it to penetrate the waxy oily skin barrier.
And so that is one of the challenges with vitamin C is formulating to actually get into the skin to do these things that we were hoping from it. Whereas melatonin is lipophilic and does penetrate the skin quite readily. Not only does it penetrate the skin readily, but it also does so robustly and it results in sustained benefits over the course of the following day.
I already mentioned earlier in the article how topical melatonin can help reduce UV damage. Well, it boosts up the skin’s antioxidative enzymes and that boost lasts like 24 hours. And that’s important because when you are exposed to UV, your skin kind of has to handle that well into the night.
But there is a circadian rhythm to your skin and at night your skin does do a lot more healing and repair as you sleep, the immune system kind of comes in. So melatonin is vital actually in kind of how that is orchestrated and how a lot of the antioxidant systems go in and help to fight off the damage from throughout the day.
So applying melatonin may help in dealing with some of that. I’m not a cosmetic chemist, but from the literature that I have read about topical melatonin and the studies that I have come across on topical melatonin, overall, from a formulation perspective, it seems a lot easier to work with and to formulate into a product so that it actually gets into the skin and is beneficial. And we do have studies on actual people demonstrating the benefit of the use of topical melatonin in terms of reducing the damage from exposure to UV radiation.
Melatonin For Anti-Aging
So topical melatonin, can enter the stratum corneum and create a reservoir there as well as the deeper layers of the skin, the dermis, which is the site of wrinkle formation. When our skin is exposed to UV rays, not only do we get damage to lipids and proteins and the DNA and our skin cells, but it upregulates enzymes that actually destroy our collagen.
And as we get older, our ability to regenerate and repair and heal declines. And therefore having a topical antioxidant like melatonin is an attractive intervention to help in delaying the age-related changes to the skin that compromise its function. A lot of people view antiaging as cosmetic when it comes to the skin.
In my opinion, approaching skin care with the idea of antiaging in mind, it’s really about preserving function so that as you get into your wiser adult years, you have skin that is healthy and functioning to protect you from things like pathogens and environmental stressors. You’re not as prone to irritation, or skin problems, and you maintain skin integrity wiser.
In older individuals, the skin becomes brittle, thin, and tears easily, and doesn’t heal well. People just think about skin and skin care products as promoting the cosmetic appearance of the skin. But if you think about it from a perspective of preserving function, it totally changes the game. And that you’re looking to preserve function for as long as possible because guess what? Our lifespan has gotten has increased.
A lot of my audience is female. We’re going to spend the majority of our lives post-menopausal because of increases in lifespan. And for that reason, it’s really important for you to think proactively about your skin and take care of it for preserving function as long as possible. Because guess what? In all likelihood, you’re going to be on this planet for a long time.
The last thing you want to be dealing with is skin barrier breakdown and skin breakdown and tears, poor healing later on in life. So think of it that way. It totally changes the game away from just this cosmetic vanity thing. It’s okay to care about the way you look and vanity, it’s not all bad, but a lot of people gripe that we shouldn’t be concerned with antiaging. But actually, I argue the opposite.
We should be interested in antiaging from the point of preserving function as long as possible because we are going to be here a lot longer than originally intended, so to speak, because of advances in science and advances and just how we live our lives, our lifespan has increased. So for that reason, I do think it is important.
And with women, given what I said, we are going to be on this planet longer. After menopause, one thing that happens with our skin is we start losing collagen even more because, in women, Estrogen helps to create more collagen in the skin, which helps to heal it when it gets damaged. And with menopause, our estrogen levels decline.
And that is a factor that comes in uniquely to how women’s skin ages in comparison to men, is that we lose that estrogen. And that’s why around menopause, the skin thins quite a bit and there are more visible signs of skin aging. A lot of women experience dry skin, so always be thinking about it from a proactive perspective, more so than an aesthetics vanity viewpoint.
Melatonin For Hair Loss
But one thing that impacts both adult men and women is hair loss specifically androgenetic alopecia.
It is patterned hair loss that is largely determined by your genetics and your hair follicle is sensitive to the male hormones and it miniaturizes into a baby’s hair. And that is what leads to pattern hair loss. In women, it’s going to be a widening of the central part and in men, it’s going to start with the preceding hairline. So both men and women deal with this. And topically applied melatonin has actually been shown to result in a decrease in hair loss in women with androgenetic alopecia and maintenance of current hair amount in men with androgenetic alopecia.
Now, it’s only one small study, but it is compelling topically applied melatonin. I mentioned it’s lipophilic. It can actually get down into the hair follicle, which is a tricky thing when we’re talking about topicals. That’s why a lot of those hair growth serums on the market I scoff at because there’s really not good research on the ingredients that they’re claiming for actually penetrating into the follicle.
But melatonin, albeit a small amount of research, at least it’s something that we have good kinetic studies showing actually gets into the skin and into the follicle to reach down there and help cut down on the rate of hair loss in both men and women.
Now, how it’s working, we don’t actually know. It could be by minimizing oxidative stress to those hair follicle cells. That’s the most likely mechanism. But could it be doing something with the androgen receptor on the hair follicle?
Who knows? So more research certainly is needed when we’re talking about topical melatonin for hair loss. But it has been shown in at least one small study to yield benefits. And I will also point out that in that study there was not only a benefit in hair loss but some of the participants in the study had Siberia oily scalp dandruff that goes under the umbrella of Siberia dermatitis, and that improved with topical melatonin. So perhaps it creates, maybe it does something with the relative amounts of sebum produced because it is a hormone, and oil production is governed by hormonal signals.
Hard to say for sure. I’m merely speculating on mechanisms at this point. But that is all the more reason to be interested in topical melatonin for the maintenance of your hair. So that’s melatonin an antioxidant that when applied topically, shows a lot of promise for mitigating the damage that occurs from exposure to a variety of environmental stressors, thus having an antiaging effect. And we know that melatonin has anticancer properties, so it could help reduce the damage to cells that leads to down-the-road skin cancers.
Merely speculative at this point, but it’s definitely a compelling ingredient for more research.
Melatonin For Preventing Sun Damage
To be clear though, while topical melatonin can potentially reduce the burden of damage to the skin from exposure to ultraviolet radiation, you do still need to protect your skin from the sun by wearing a broad spectrum sunscreen, sun protective clothing, not staying out too long, seeking shade, because antioxidants, they kind of will do some damage control.
But you really want to just reduce your overall exposure to UV and that’s going to be from sun protection like sunscreen and sun protective behaviors like wearing a hat and whatnot. So you still need to do both. But the combination is compelling for having the best outcome, one would suppose, on reducing the burden of damage from UV exposure.
But sunscreen is not going to protect you from pollution, which generates free radicals. It’s not going to protect you necessarily from visible light. Some formulas may, but it’s not something that is standardized in sunscreen manufacturing to assay for. So you never really know to what extent your sunscreen is protecting from those wavelengths of light.
Skin Care Products With Melatonin
So are there any products out there that have melatonin in them?
You’ll find it in a lot of products out there. Faded topicals brightening and clearing serum I recently reviewed for you guys. It has melatonin in it. Now, bear in mind, melatonin, it is a cosmeceutical ingredient. So products that have it, they’re not regulated, they don’t actually have to demonstrate that their product has a good amount of it or that it actually is formulated correctly. You’re just kind of at the mercy of the manufacturer.
Melatonin Supplements
But you may be wondering, should we just be taking a melatonin supplement? I would pause on that because a lot of the melatonin supplements on the market, have very high amounts of melatonin in them. And whether or not that’s actually safe to take, especially on a consistent basis, we really don’t know. Melatonin supplements, they’re most useful for people who have sleep rhythm disorders, like swing shift workers.
Maybe you’ve come back from a trip and you’re jet-lagged, they’re not meant to be used daily on a long-term basis for most people. Now, of course, there are exceptions to that, but there is also research to suggest that taking high amounts of Melatonin is associated with dementia. And so you want to be careful to just not be taking something unnecessarily. If you are having trouble sleeping, I do suggest getting your sleep hygiene in check.
I give some tips there. But at the end of the day, when it comes to melatonin supplements, I don’t think it’s a good idea to just take them, because the risks are just not well established with taking a Melatonin supplement. A lot of the supplements on the market have very high amounts that could potentially have harmful effects on you. And the research that we have shows that applying it to the skin, does get into the skin quite well. So that’s melatonin, it shows a lot of promise for an antiaging effect on the skin.
And by antiaging, I remember it’s about preserving function, it’s not just about cosmetics. All right, you guys let me know in the comments, though. Have you heard of melatonin and skin care products? Are you using a product with melatonin in it? Let us know.
