A Sneaky Root Cause Of Increased Fine Lines & Wrinkles After 40

One of the reasons your skin appears so taut in your teens and early 20s is the amount of collagen beneath the surface. While the exact age your collagen bank begins to decline depends on the person, research shows the average age is around your mid-20s. 

After that, collagen declines by about 1% each year1. However, once you reach menopause, that annual dip jumps to about 30% in the first five years of menopause and 2% each year thereafter. 

Collagen's role in the body is pretty abundant: It helps make up the structure of our skin, bone, cartilage, and muscle, with the purpose of helping tissues be more elastic and withstand stretching—hence, why a decline may lead to fine lines and sagging. 

Now, while there's nothing you can do to mitigate skin aging completely (nor should you feel the need to), it is important to maintain your skin health during this time and support the fluctuations.

One more underrated tip: Don't stress too much about your wrinkles. As we mentioned earlier, stress actually causes accelerated skin aging, so getting worked up over natural aging will only kick-start a negative feedback loop.