You may be a person who welcomes a scar on your body as a sign of toughness. However, most of us search for ways to get rid of scars. Birthmarks are not always welcome identifiers either. While there are people who claim to get significant results when using Vitamin E to help with scars and birthmarks, the fact is that to date there is no scientific research to back that up.
Antioxidant
Vitamin E is an antioxidant. The role of an antioxidant is to help fight free radicals that want to do damage to your body. It is a good source of nutrition for your skin because it works together with other nutrients as healing properties, and it helps keep your skin from aging by protecting it against free radicals. You get vitamin E in your food and you can take vitamin E supplements as well.
Vitamin E Used Internally
The natural sources of nutrition you consume in your diet along with extra vitamins in supplement form have positive effects on your skin. Vitamin E provides many scientifically proven health benefits for your body, including healing and maintaining healthy skin. In your food, you get vitamin E from: wheat germ, liver, eggs, nuts, sunflower seeds, dark green leafy vegetables, avacado, and yams. The recommended dose of vitamin E in supplement form is 400 – 800 IU per day. More has not been proven to give added benefits.
Vitamin E Used Topically
Vitamin E is used in many skin care products because it supports healthy skin by protecting skin cells. While the ability for vitamin E as a topical solution to help heal your scars is still being studied, there are doctors and natural health practitioners that still recommend using it and people who state they are getting good results. One consideration of using vitamin E topically is that it can result in dryness of your skin.
Scars
The body has a way of protecting itself when something traumatic happens to it. When your skin is damaged, the body will support the wound healing by bringing extra connective tissue to the site. Unfortunately this can result in a scar. The connective tissue is thicker than the rest of the skin because it doesn’t have the same healthy blood supply your skin normally has. Vitamin E that is consumed will help from the inside of your body.
Used topically as a skin conditioner, vitamin E may loosen and soften your scar. People who have obtained positive results using vitamin E to impact scars point out that massaging the vitamin E into your scar on a regular basis is key to the process. It may take weeks or months to see improvement. The suggested way to use vitamin E topically to help scars is to obtain it in liquid form or squeeze it from a gel tablet and apply directly to the scar.
Vitamin E for Birthmarks
Birthmarks, caused by an overproduction of cells, are either red or pigmented and can fade or even disappear over time. People have used natural solutions like applying vitamin E to the birthmark successfully, although it is not scientifically proven. It has also been found helpful to add orange oil to the Vitamin E and apply to the birthmark.