Green tea is one of the oldest tricks in the book, as in, it’s ancient. Fun fact: It’s also one of the world’s most awesome happy accidents, or so they say. Legend has it that back around 2737 B.C. Chinese Emperor Shennong accidentally drank a cup of hot water with a dead leaf in it. At first, he just liked the refreshing taste; now centuries later, we’ve discovered green tea has a whole list of health benefits.
From green tea toners to matcha masks, you’ll see green tea in skincare products all over the shelves. Whenever we start seeing something pop up everywhere, you know we love to do some recon. So, here’s the tea (sorry, had to).
Yes, green tea has a super power it’s called epigallocatechin gallate, or EGCG, which is a powerful antioxidant. But what does that mean? Let’s take a second to breakdown the word: anti + oxident = something that fights oxidation.
Pollution sucks for a lot of reasons, and one of them is that it leaves free radicals in the air. You know when you leave an apple out for a few days and it starts to get brown spots? That’s from oxidation that happens because of free radicals, and it’s happening to your skin too. Sorry, that was a tough pill to swallow, so here’s the good news:
It’s been found that at the right doses green tea has the ability to rid your skin of reactive oxygen species aka free radicals caused by urban pollution. There were a lot of sciency words in there, but what it really means is that green tea has been proven to fight the signs of aging by scavenging the stuff that gives you dark spots or makes your skin look dull and saggy.
More good news: Not only does green tea get rid of the bad stuff, it gives you the good stuff. Collagen is a hot word right now, but it’s way more than a supplement to add to your smoothie.
We care about collagen because it’s the stuff that makes our skin look young by giving it structure and bounce. As we get older, our bodies naturally make less and less of it, but green tea can help you with that since EGCG promotes collagen production.
Everybody knows a cup of green tea gives your body a surge of energy… like coffee but chiller. In your products, that caffeine translates to skin energy, AKA a bright glow.
Melasma is kind of the anti-glow. Everyone already has melanin in them, it’s what gives us skin pigmentation, but things like birth control, sun damage and pregnancy can cause more of it to show up in awkward places like the upper lip and arm pits.
Green tea can help with that because it comes from the plant Camellia sinensis. Water extracts from this plant have been proven to be helpful skin-whitening agents which is what we use to reverse melasma.
Acne irritates your skin and irritation causes inflammation. EGCG has been shown to reduce inflammation, but even better, it can also reduce sebum. When you apply it topically, green tea can help get rid of the redness on the outside of your pimple and the oil on the inside of it.
Drinking green tea can also have some of those same benefits for acne. So, next time you’re breaking out try doing a green tea mask while you brew yourself a cup.
Even when you aren’t breaking out, green tea’s ability to reduce sebum can continue to help your complexion.
When you look at your face and notice that you can see your pores much more clearly in some places, that’s because you have oil trapped in them. The oil is making your pores expand and become more visible. Green tea masks are great because they can help minimize this issue.
Anti-aging, antioxidant, anti-acne: basically, green tea is a skincare warrior. So, let’s all take a moment to thank the mythical Emperor Shennong for discovering this amazing ingredient as we click “add to cart” on a green tea face mask.
Sources:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31252129
