If you’re a serious skintellectual and spend your free time poring over studies and articles about the best and brightest ingredients on the market, you probably have a pretty good working knowledge of the usual skincare heroes. But even with all that background, there’s bound to be at least a few ingredients on your skincare packaging that have you wondering why they were included.
It’s important to try and get to know each ingredient you’re working into your skincare routine, so you fully understand the benefits they provide and you can get them to work well together to keep your skin bright and nourished.
So, let’s talk about Camellia sinensis leaf extract. What is it, and why should you be eager to add it to your skincare lineup as soon as possible?
What Is Camellia Sinensis Leaf Extract?
If you’ve spent any time reading about how to keep your mind and body healthy, you’ve probably come across more than one person touting the benefits of green tea. In addition to being a delicious, fresh, energizing beverage option, green tea has all sorts of qualities that make it an amazing addition to your skincare routine, too.
What does that have to do with Camellia sinensis leaf extract?
Well, Camellia sinensis is a species of shrub whose leaves can be used to make tea — all the teas. Camellia sinensis can be used to produce most types of tea like green, white, oolong, and even dark teas like pu-erh.
If you’re an avid tea drinker, you’re probably all too ready to tell us the health benefits of teas like green tea, but if you’re more of a takes your coffee without cream and sugar kind of person, green tea might not even be on your radar.
However, green tea actually has a wide variety of health benefits. For one, green tea can work as a natural soother because it is rich in polyphenols.
Green tea also contains compounds that can reduce free radicals and help protect your cells from damage. Both Camellia sinensis’s abilities to naturally soothe and combat free radicals make it great for keeping your body looking and feeling young.
Green tea is also thought to have a positive impact on your metabolism and in helping your body to burn fat thanks to the fair amount of caffeine found in each leaf.
Basically, Camellia sinensis is a plant with amazing all-around benefits for your body. But how can it help your skin?
How Does Camellia Sinensis Leaf Extract Benefit Your Skin?
In addition to offering benefits to your body when consumed, Camellia sinensis has many things to offer to your complexion when applied topically.
Much like when consumed, applying Camellia sinensis to your skin offers natural soothing benefits. This is crucial when it comes to fighting off visible signs of aging, as well as reducing redness and supporting your skin’s natural renewal process. Because your skin’s collagen production will naturally reduce as you age, it’s important to nourish and protect your skin early on so you don’t accelerate this process!
Camellia sinensis is also shown in studies to promote a smoother-looking skin texture. If you struggle with blemishes or rough patches that detract from your complexion, Camellia sinensis may help to even things out and restore your skin’s overall texture.
Additionally, Camellia sinensis has qualities which promote skin hydration, both in the short and long term. While it’s no replacement for a powerful barrier cream, it’s helpful to use skincare ingredients that are beneficial on multiple levels.
While you may not be reaching for a Ca mellia sinensis leaf extract product specifically to hydrate your skin, it’s reassuring to know that your moisturizer has a bit of backup elsewhere in your routine.
Basically — Camellia sinensis leaf extract is an all-around heavy-hitter when it comes to keeping your skin nourished and youthful. No matter what your skincare priorities are, finding a product that includes Camellia sinensis as a base can go a long way toward helping you meet your skincare goals (which is why we use it in place of plain water in our own skin-nourishing formulas!).
How Do You Use Camellia Sinensis Leaf Extract in Skincare?
While upping your consumption of green tea or other types of tea may offer other benefits to your body, when it comes to your complexion, you’re going to want to add products to your skincare lineup that provide your daily dose of Camellia sinensis topically.
There are a couple of different ways to go about adding Camellia sinensis leaf extract into your routine.
One way is to make it the focal point of one of your products. If your main goal is to reap the benefits of Camellia sinensis, or you live somewhere particularly bright and sunny and are wary of sun damage even with SPF, then you’ll want to find a product that makes green (or another type of) tea extract the star of the show.
Such products should have a high concentration of those ever-helpful polyphenols, so it’s important to give the label of any prospective product a good read. A really concentrated Camellia sinensis product will highlight green tea as a main ingredient, and should combine this rejuvenating powerhouse with other powerful natural ingredients.
Alternatively, the benefits of Camellia sinensis leaf extract work well as a complimentary ingredient, like a base, alongside other nourishing botanicals — it doesn’t have to be the focus to benefit your skin!
For instance, our Chebula Active Serum is a clinically proven formula to work into your routine if your priority is improving your overall skin tone and addressing components of aging skin, like fine lines and wrinkles.
It’s packed with chebula, which is one of the most bioactive, cascading antioxidants that fights five signs of aging. That’s paired with soothing aloe vera and super-hydrating hyaluronic acid.
Our Chebula Active Serum is also formulated with Camellia sinensis leaf extract, which increases the serum’s ability to soothe, tone, and bring out glowing, youthful skin.
If you’re using a serum that incorporates Camellia sinensis leaf extract, you can work it into your routine before you moisturize, but after you cleanse your face. Just work a couple of drops of your chosen serum into clean skin in the morning before you moisturize and apply your SPF, and then again in the evening after washing your face and before your night cream.
How Else Can I Incorporate Camellia Sinensis Leaf Extract Into My Routine?
No matter how into skincare you are and no matter how knowledgeable, it’s so easy to forget the basic fact that your skin is more than just your face! Because your face is front and center of your beauty considerations so often, our bodies often go slightly underappreciated, even though the rest of our skin needs a little love from time to time, too.
Finding a body product that includes Camellia sinensis leaf extract can help bring the benefits of antioxidant properties to more than just your face, which is especially helpful if you spend a lot of time in the sun or live in a warmer climate.
While you should always protect yourself with sunscreen wherever you’re exposed to the sun, using a body wash or exfoliating scrub that’s formulated with green tea extract can help ensure that your body gets the rejuvenation it needs after a long day in the sun.
Then, of course, there’s the other obvious option: while you should drink extract of any kind on its own, occasionally replacing your morning coffee with a soothing cup of green tea can offer all of the benefits we mentioned above, and help get your day off to a good start.
Especially if you’re a bit of a caffeine addict, green tea has about a third of the caffeine of a cup of coffee, so it’s worth trying to swap it out occasionally to stay healthy and mindful of how you’re treating your body, inside and out.
In Conclusion
It’s often been said that we can’t have it all, but when it comes to Camellia sinensis leaf extract, we totally can!
Not only is this ingredient famous for its natural soothing properties and its ability to help nourish skin and help protect it from free radicals, but it has potent properties that can help improve the look of aging while also working to soothe and tone complexion.
Plus, there are even benefits to consuming other products of the Camellia sinensis plant, like improving your metabolism and giving you a jitter-free boost of energy.
Tea extracts are all-around superheroes when it comes to keeping your body nourished and energized, inside and out, so if you’re looking to add something new to your skincare routine, look no further than Camellia sinensis as a skincare base that gives formulas a little extra oomph.
Sources:
The Role of Polyphenols in Human Health and Food Systems: A Mini-Review | frontiers in Nutrition