Sunlight causes wrinkles, among other kinds of skin damage, but a different kind of light – specifically the red glow from LEDs – may help to smooth them out by altering the interactions between water and elastic proteins in the skin.
Andrei Sommer and Dan Zhu of the University of Ulm in Germany have been investigating how water molecules in the skin interact with different substances. They found that water molecules close to a hydrophobic, or “water-hating”, substance formed a slippery crystalline layer, while those surrounding a hydrophilic, or water-loving, substance were glue-like.
Elastin, the fibrous protein that gives skin its elasticity…
