Elastin

Exactly.

Elastin, on the other hand, is what gives your skin its snap.

Like, if you pinch the skin on the back of a teenager's hand, it snaps back instantly.

Right, because their elastin is perfect.

Exactly.

Elastin provides the crucial recoil strength.

It allows these pelvic tissues to stretch under a sudden spike in physical stress.

The sneeze, the jump, the cough, and then immediately, elastically, snap back into their original supportive shape.

To understand why elastin fails, you have to understand how it gets there in the first place.

Okay.

Elastin is a fascinating, highly complex protein because it is almost entirely synthesized during fetal development and early childhood.

Wait, really? Just in childhood?

Let's go to the sort of aesthetic medicine part of my life, which I do a lot of as well.

In aesthetic medicine, there's buzzwords like collagen, Alaskan banded around all over the place.

Typically, they mean nothing.

But when you're studying that, you're basically studying protein and the production of protein that the cell is trying to push out of itself.

I think that's one way to do it.

Then the arms, there's a lot of companies like Elastin, Hydrenity, Plated.

There's companies that have really good products.

But secondly, I think it's even just the back of the hand is the skin texture and thickness.

So again, some of those products will help improve Elastin and collagen, which can then again improve the integrity of the skin.

But then also fat grafting.

So some people we actually will take as a hand surgeon, you know, this is probably the one aesthetic thing we did in hand surgery was, you know, taking fat from one area and then, you know, injecting into the back of the hand to kind of give it that more kind of youthful, full look.