Are you an orange juice drinker or a grapefruit juice drinker? Do you prefer concentrate or fresh squeezed? Do you avoid the pulp or are you good to drink the pulp too? In this post I am going to touch on vitamin C both internally and topically and try and help you to understand how vitamin C can help your skin produce collagen both internally and on the surface and why natural vitamin C from nature is best.
Different types of Citrus
Okay so lets start with the basics. What do we have for citrus fruits? We have lemons, limes, oranges, mandarins, tangerines and grapefruit. Now note that limes have more vitamin C than oranges. (Just a side mention) What I want to emphasize here is grapefruits and oranges. Lets start with fruit juice basics and I’ll try and tie this into skin as best as I can. Were going to start with the healthiest orange juice is pure oranges that are freshly squeezed or juiced. The same with grapefruit. Why do you want it freshly squeezed? When the fruit is freshly squeezed it has the most nutrients. Also the white of the peel is full of nutrition and one thing I do is peel the whole orange and put it in my Vitamix blender. I will make sure to keep as much white pulp on as possible and I sometimes cheat and add a little bit of skin as I blend it up.
I noticed a trend in Miami when I was going to get fresh squeezed orange juice. Have you seen those orange squeezing machines that the base is yellow and you put the oranges in and then they turn the machine on as you order and the oranges start to get squeezed and there is your fresh juice? Well I’ve noticed lately I will go to order the fresh juice and they just hand me an orange juice in a plastic cup in the refrigerator made earlier in the day and say here you go it was made fresh this morning. Do you know how annoyed I get? I want to have Fresh Fresh orange juice and I ordered it and paid more because I see the machine and then they hand me orange juice that is 5 hours old? Probably absorbing all the plastic from the cup that I will now be consuming. Anyways the point is the freshest most nutrient rich juice is fresh squeezed. Otherwise it is better if you just eat the fruit directly.
Next we have grapefruit. Grapefruit is a little more on the bitter side. One way I like to sweeten grapefruit juice up is with honey. If you ever cut a grapefruit in half and cut out the little triangles and eat with a spoon its nice to add honey. Eat the little grapefruit wedges and then squeeze out the rest of the juice and get as many nutrients as possible. Note in all citrus fruits you want seeds. We do not want to buy seedless as that is basically GMO. That means the fruit has been altered and with that alteration your body does not read the nutrient codes the same. Its like your eating a whole orange and getting half the nutrients. So embrace those seeds let them be in your glass. Have fun with them. I let them get blended up in the Vitamix blender too. Seeds are our friends and seeds are life.
Citrus and Collagen
Citrus fruit has a lot of great health benefits but I am going to emphasize here grapefruit first. Why because grapefruit is in first place of the citrus family for the most nutrients for skin and oranges come in second. So grapefruit contains flavones and flavonoids. This helps with phytonutrients. Phyto attracts the sun hence why they say citrus can give you sun spots. In small doses though the sun is very healing for you. Grapefruit can also have drug interactions. Note if your taking any prescription or vitamins not on an empty stomach and not going from straight grapefruit consumption to vitamin/medicine consumption. Your stomach will more than likely have a reaction. The vitamin C content in grapefruit juice plays a role in collagen formation of the skin. This is important for the skin cells to keep there strength and structure. This is why I am trying to emphasize fresh juice not concentrate. With concentrate there is usually added sugars.
If you have to buy fresh orange or grapefruit juice you also would want to look for unpasteurized juice. Pasteurization heats up the juice to remove any bacteria but the heating process takes away the nutrients. Lets be honest how much bacteria is in citrus fruits? Little to none is my guess that is why I am always on the hunt for unpasteurized juices. So again lets imagine your drinking a full 12 ounce bottle of juice that you just spent about $5 on but your getting about 3o percent of the nutrients from the actual fruit. I can tell you that Trader Joes sells unpasteurized orange juice and I know in the state of Florida WaWa the gas station and minimart offers unpasteurized orange juice. I cannot speak for Wawa in other states as I haven’t seen if the unpasteurized juice is offered.
Vitamin C in Skincare
So moving on we’ve covered the bases of vitamin C internally and how important and good for you it is to have the purest form of citrus juice. Now lets talk about vitamin C in skincare products. I’m going to share a short facial room story here to give you an idea of how important is it to have real ingredients in your skincare products.
So I was working at a spa in Hollywood Ca and this particular spa carried two product lines. I was new to both product brands and I was in my training phase. (basically giving free facials) Can learn about that more from this post. https://elementlufu.com/confessions-of-a-licensed-esthetician/
I had done the one training with the first brand lets just say it was a French line and they offered a vitamin C facial. So previously my new coworker, we were both training and new, had given me the vitamin C facial from the French line. On this day we were meeting with the trainer from the second brand of skincare products that were more natural and made right there in Santa Monica. Now before we started training my coworker asked me, “Oh I want to know how did your skin feel after the facial I gave you?” I had received the facial and everything was fine but about 3 hours later my face felt so dry and was itching and tight. I explained to her what had happened and then the trainer from the other skincare brand made the comment that the product probably wasn’t natural and a lot of times brands use ascorbic acid as vitamin C which is lab made or the vitamin form almost imagine a powder.
We then proceeded to learn about this new skincare brand and had our training from an all natural version of vitamin C that is literally extracted from the citrus fruit. I learned a lot that day about lab made and actual nature derived ingredients in skincare products. My visual for this one is imagine an orange cut open and rubbed on one side of your face and then imagine a chewable vitamin C vitamin either rubbed on your other cheek or diluted in water and then rubbed on your face. Which side do you think is going to feel better? Its hands down that nature wins. Not lab created products.
Another experience I had was with another well know skincare brand that lets just say they promote themselves as medical grade. Aka lab made ingredients or medical ingredients. I had moved to Florida by now and was working in a higher end spa and they offered a lot of different product lines. I was training with the different lines and I gave two different facials to two different estheticians that worked in the spa. So one of the training expectations is to give the person feedback on their skin. Can I tell you both of these women’s skin felt DRY like sandpaper almost. This is two separate women and two separate facials within weeks of each other.
The first one I had commented oh your skin feels a little on the dry side. She claimed that her skin wasn’t dry and that she was using the vitamin C serum from said product line. I couldn’t argue with her because 1) I’m not there to make her feel bad and 2) she is an esthetician as well and she knows what she knows. I can personally say I had never felt such dry skin but I left it alone. The second facial and second esthetician same thing. Dry dry skin. I made the comment, oh your skin feels a little dry what products are you using? She replied with the same vitamin C serum that the previous esthetician was using. Both of them had the tightest driest skin I had ever felt. So I know that I would not recommend that product to anyone. But again medical grade doesn’t mean its good. If anything your skin wont absorb the product the same. (I can explain how that works in another post).
Conclusion
So in conclusion what have we learned? Nature works best, YES??? Both on the internal intake of fruit juices and the purity of the juice or the fruit and on the topical skin level. I can tell you as your reading a skincare label it can be very hard to determine if the vitamin C in the product is ascorbic acid or vitamin C extracted from citrus fruit. One way to know is if the ingredient label flat out says ascorbic acid I would give that a no. You can sometimes know if a brand has an emphasis on natural products from nature and or has ingredients organically grown or from the farm. If I had to guess I’d say its 50/50 these days of which skincare lines carry natural vitamin C. The said brands that I was working with in this post were Arcona, Dr. Dennis Gross, and Guinot. You can plug in on your own which one was which in the story.
If you are interested in fresh citrus fruit grown on a farm in central Florida and shipped directly to your door year round then I have a link for you. Hale Groves even has a citrus club where you can have citrus shipped to you on a monthly basis. Also great they offer gift boxes you can surprise your friends and family. (Incoming affiliate link.) By clicking on the link I gain a little commission but does not affect your cost. Click on the link below and check out the many citrus options available to you. Please leave any questions or comments in the contact form and remember natural is always better for the body internally and externally.
http://www.halegroves.com/?utm_source=AFF&utm_medium=AFF&utm_campaign=AFF