Don't Neglect Your Neck!

It can give away your age if not pampered properly

If your skincare regimen ends at your chin, you're neglecting one of the most delicate parts on your body. "The skin on your neck, chest and décolletage is thinner and more sensitive than the skin on your face," says dermatologist Marina Peredo, founder of Spatique Medical Spa in Smithtown, NY. "What's more, the neck doesn't have as many sebaceous oil glands as the face so it ages far more quickly."

Overlooking your neck can leave this area dull looking. "I've seen women in my office who look like their head is attached to someone else's body," says Peredo. With a little TLC, however, you won't have to hide behind a turtleneck. Here's your skincare regimen.

Use Sunscreen Every Day ... Even the Cloudy Ones
An essential first step to protecting and pampering you neck and chest is applying sunscreen from your jaw line all the way down to your neckline-crew neck, plunging or v-neck. Lancôme Renergie Lift Volumetry for Normal to Combination Skin combines an SPF 15 with a ton of other benefits. Its GF-Volumetry complex supports communication among cells, sending out the message to lift and tighten. After just four weeks of use, the jaw line looks more defined and the angle between the neck and jaw line is sharper. Clinical studies show an 8-degree improvement in facial angles.

Introduce a Retinol Cream to Your Regime
Retinol is a vitamin A derivative that speeds cell turnover, sloughing off the skin's dull outer layers to reveal the fresh baby-soft new skin that lies just below. Retinols also help boost collagen production, which smoothes skin, reduces fine lines and minimizes those pesky ring-around-the-neck lines (sometimes called tree-ring lines).

L'Oreal Advanced RevitaLift Face & Neck Day Cream combines encapsulated pro-retinyl A with marine extract to reduce the number and length of lines and winkles. The results are instant-94 percent of women say they saw smoother, more supple skin as soon as they applied the cream, and 88 percent reported firmer skin after just two weeks.

Moisturizer is Your Best Friend
Skin that's lacking in hydration looks dry, dull and deflated. Olay Total Effects Night Firming Cream for Face and Neck is a fast-absorbing moisture cream that combines vitamins, antioxidants and wheat proteins to nourish dry skin, improve texture with gentle exfoliation, minimize the appearance of pores, fine lines and wrinkles and-there's more!-balance skin tone and diminish age spots.

Mature skin will get an extra boost from L'Oreal Age Perfect Hydra-Nutrition Golden Balm Face/Neck/Chest, a rich, butter-soft formula that combines nourishing essential oils with skin-strengthening calcium to penetrate deep below the surface of the skin and lock in extreme hydration for 24 hours.

Lift and Firm ... and Not in the Gym
The neck and chest are especially vulnerable to the downward tug of gravity. Restore lift with Hydroxatone Declatone Neck & Decollete Complex, a mega-concentrated blend of skin-firming and tightening ingredients that helps the body renew its own collagen-building networks.

Seven years of research went into the development of Pro-Xylane, a breakthrough molecule that adds density to thinning menopausal and post-menopausal skin. It's a key ingredient in Vichy NeOvadiol GF Night Densifying Re-Sculpting Care. Women reported a firmer neck, redefined jaw line and smoother lines after just 20 days of use.

That's it! Just four steps to a luminous, swanlike neck!