Why We're Launching with the “First 4” Areas of Aging

This spring, we’re launching Modern Age, an aging wellness platform with tools, treatments, and products that are personalized for your needs across skin, hair, hormones, and bones. While we plan on expanding our care to other aspects of your health in the future, we wanted to share why we picked these categories as a place to start.

Today, our care options tend to address these four areas of health individually. You see one provider for skin concerns and another for hormone balance. While specialized healthcare is great for deep answers on a single issue, the truth is that our body is all connected — one large, complicated system that is in constant communication. Our goal is to help our customers not just treat symptoms, like low energy or dry skin, but also to understand what’s causing those symptoms, particularly as our bodies change as we get older.

We take this approach because we believe that your age isn’t simply a marker of time, but rather a unique combination of factors that contribute to your healthspan. Your skin and hair impact how you look; your hormones play a vital role in how you feel; and while you can’t see your bones age and may not think of them day-to-day, they support you in your daily life. All of these contribute to your subjective age — or how old you feel.

Let’s dive deeper into the four categories that will comprise our initial offering; why they are key components of the aging experience for most people; and how they are connected.

Skin

In hundreds of interviews and surveys, we found that most people first noticed signs of aging in their skin. It makes sense: Not only is the skin our largest organ, but it’s also a window into our overall health and wellbeing, and as certain processes in our body begin to slow due to age, we experience changes on the surface.

As early as our mid-twenties, skin begins to undergo biological changes that cause a depletion of collagen (the skin’s support system) and hyaluronic acid (a humectant that holds onto water to keep skin plump). While everyone is different, many people tend to notice this dwindling effect sometime around their mid-30s, and when this happens it usually results in fine lines, a loss of volume, and dry skin.

What’s more, intolerances, allergies, illnesses, or off-kilter hormones can show up on our skin in a number of different ways. For example, declining estrogen levels in women can cause the skin to sag and appear yellowish in color. Hyperpigmentation from melasma, contrarily, is often associated with higher levels of estrogen in the body. Needless to say, your hormones can control a lot about how your skin ages.

Finally, our skin acts as a barrier between us and the sun’s rays. The more times you have made that journey around the sun, the more work your skin has had to do on your behalf. In fact, 90 percent of the signs of aging in your skin come from UV rays.

Hair

On any given day, it’s completely normal to lose up to 100 strands of hair as you go through a normal growing and shedding cycle. Certain life events, however, such as stress, hormonal changes, pregnancy, and aging processes can make hair loss increase.

In fact, according to a statistic from the American Academy of Dermatology, it’s estimated that 40 percent of women will have visible hair loss by the time they hit 40, and while there are a few different types of hair loss, androgenic alopecia — or alopecia caused by an excess of androgen hormones — is the most common. Another called telogen effluvium occurs after a stressful event (such as childbirth, a divorce, or you know, a global pandemic), because your body redirects its energy and resources to the parts of the body that are vital for survival and hair doesn’t get the nutrients it needs to thrive.

Many people who experience the physical effects of hair loss, also undergo a component of poor mental health that coincides with it. Women who have experienced hair loss report feeling embarrassed or ashamed. But know this: Once shedding stops, hair grows about half an inch every month, so you’ll begin to see meaningful length start to come in once you’ve addressed the root cause of your shedding.

Bones

If you’re under the age of 60, you likely haven’t spent much time thinking about your bone health. Bones are the critical scaffolding that support our entire bodies, and just as you can build strong muscles, so too can you build strong bones. Research has indicated that we can do so through a proper diet and exercise, which improves how we walk, sit, play with our kids, and enjoy the things we like to do.

Throughout our lifetimes, our bodies are constantly remodeling our bones, removing existing minerals from the bone to the bloodstream through a process called resorption and laying down new stem cells to help reconstruct our bones through a process called ossification. (In fact, we regrow our skeletal system entirely every 10 years.) Until we hit our peak bone mass — usually around 30 — our bodies skew towards ossification, or growing and strengthening our bones. After this time, however, the process swings in the other direction, favoring bone resorption, which generally weakens our bones. That means that when fractures happen later in life on bones that aren’t easily able to strengthen themselves, the consequences can be severe.

One in three adults aged 50 or older dies within 12 months of suffering a hip fracture. Women, in particular, experience three-quarters of all hip fractures, and researchers suspect that hormonal shifts following menopause make women’s bones more fragile, because the rates of resorption are incredibly high in post-menopausal women, due to estrogen deficiency. (If you’re seeing a throughline that connects your hormones to everything about your body, we’re not done yet).

So what does all of this mean for you? Quite simply, it’s worth thinking about your bone health earlier than you might have thought was necessary. Once your body favors resorption, your goal is to continue to preserve as much bone density as possible so that you’re set up for success in later life.

Hormones

Hormones make up the endocrine system and impact every aspect of our lives: from how we wake to how we sleep; our mental clarity; our libido; our energy; our appetite; our moods. When something with our hormones is off, it usually shows up as a problem with something else — meaning you might feel exhausted all the time, you might gain weight, your hair might be falling out, or your skin might not look how it normally does. These cues are helpful in sensing that something may be wrong, but the best way to know for sure is through a hormone panel. This can show you if anything is out of range and give you a better sense of why you might be feeling the way that you are.

It’s inevitable for our hormones to shift as we age, and importantly, this doesn’t just happen around big events like menstruation and menopause. Our sex hormones — estrogen, progesterone, testosterone — tend to ebb and flow over the course of a month. Meaningfully, however, estrogen and progesterone tend to dip around 40 or 50 in women and stay low; testosterone, which helps stimulate estrogen production, falls as well. These hormones are vital to how we feel so when estrogen declines, you can feel night sweats, heart palpitations, get headaches, and experience bone loss. Similarly, progesterone dips can cause irregular periods and the absence of testosterone affects libido and our production of other hormones.

While sex hormones may be the first to come to mind when we think of the endocrine system, they’re accompanied by a host of others that dictate how we feel day-to-day. Thyroid hormones control our metabolism. When the body produces too little thyroid, it results in hypothyroidism, wherein people report tiredness and weight gain; when the body produces too much thyroid hormone, it results in hyperthyroidism which leads to weight loss and hyperactivity.

Both the “sleep hormone” melatonin and the “stress hormone” cortisol affect our circadian rhythm. Melatonin is produced by our bodies in the darkness and is responsible for helping us fall asleep and assisting with better REM sleep. As we age, studies have shown that we produce less melatonin to help lure us to sleep and we produce more cortisol, which encourages our bodies to wake up. Vitamin D, which despite its name is functionally a hormone, plays an important role in our mood, our bone health, and our immune systems. It also is involved in producing melatonin and is believed to help block the production of cortisol, so it’s also vital to our sleep-wake cycles as well.

As you can see, our endocrine system is intricately connected. When one hormone level dips out of range, it’s quite easy for others to follow suit. Identifying opportunities to optimize your hormones can help you feel better today and in the long term.

So what does all of this mean for you?

Aging is a complicated process that impacts every system in our body and starts earlier than you may realize. Modern Age is excited to help you on the path to healthier aging beginning with skin, hair, bones, and hormones. It’s the first step in taking control of your aging journey.