Vitamin B5 for Skin: Everything You Need to Know
Our skin needs various vitamins and minerals to look and feel its best, especially as we get older and our skin produces less collagen and elastin. One of the most important compounds is vitamin B5: a multifaceted and versatile vitamin that plays several major roles in the body.
Today, let’s break down how vitamin B5 affects the skin and explore everything you need to know about this valuable critical vitamin.
What Is Vitamin B5?
Vitamin B5, also called pantothenic acid, is a water-soluble vitamin that plays several key roles in the body, boosting overall wellness and offering several skin benefits. As a water-soluble vitamin, you need to consume vitamin B5 from your food since your body can’t store it in fat.
Fortunately, practically all foods contain at least small quantities of pantothenic acid. This is a good thing given vitamin B5’s many crucial functions, which include:
- Helping your body synthesize cholesterol
- Converting the food you consume into glucose, a type of sugar your body uses for energy
- Creating red blood cells
- Making stress and sex-related hormones
- Helping the body break down carbohydrates, fats, and proteins
- Synthesizing CoA or Coenzyme A, which is needed to synthesize new fatty acids and convert food into cholesterol and fatty acids
- Helping the digestive system function properly
As you can see, vitamin B5 is one of the most important compounds you need to include in your diet or take through supplements, especially if you are pregnant or may become pregnant.
How Does Vitamin B5 Affect Skin Specifically?
Alongside the other wellness benefits that vitamin B5 is responsible for, vitamin B5 may also provide several skin-specific benefits or be used to help your skin grow and retain its strength and elasticity. Let's break down these benefits one by one.
Moisturizes Skin
For starters, some studies have indicated that vitamin B5 is a key compound for moisturizing the skin. Moisturizing your skin is crucial, and it's often related to the health of the skin barrier: a layer of fats and liquids that prevent bacteria from settling on your skin and prevent moisture from evaporating too quickly from your skin cells.
Properly moisturized skin is important, so your skin stays healthy, so skin cells are shed at a normal rate, and so that you don't accrue wrinkles or injuries faster than average. Plus, skin moisturization affects how smooth and comfortable your skin feels to the touch, so it's important for everybody.
May Reduce Blemishes
Have problems with acne? In that case, vitamin B5 might help you experience less facial acne over time or even reduce how many facial blemishes you notice.
For example, one 12-week study found that volunteers taking a vitamin B5 dietary supplement saw a significant mean reduction in the total count of lesions across their faces. While this doesn't mean that vitamin B5 can take care of acne by itself, it does mean that vitamin B5 might play a major role in how healthy your skin is overall (and thus play a role in acne likelihood as a side effect).
Soothing Effects
Also important are the soothing properties you'll see when your body has enough vitamin B5 in its diet.
Vitamin B5 can help your skin cells relax and return to normal after being injured or irritated by a compound, an injury, or some other event. Discomfort is a normal bodily response, but too much of it can lead to rashes, difficulty healing, irritation, itchiness, and more.
Vitamin B5 can help promote brighter, younger-looking skin.
May Help with Aging
Lastly, vitamin B5 may also have reverse aging effects by soothing and softening the appearance of your skin. In a nutshell, most skin aging you notice, like wrinkles or aging spots, is caused due to dry skin or your skin not producing as much collagen and elastin as it did when you were younger.
Vitamin B5 may support healthy skin cells for a more even skin tone appearance while also contributing to skin firmness,
More importantly, by assisting with moisturization, vitamin B5 could have positive effects in another way since it stops your skin from drying out.
It’s clear that vitamin B5 plays a major role in long-term skin health; the more that you have, the more gracefully your skin may age over time.
Where To Find Vitamin B5 for Skin?
Given that vitamin B5 is so important, it’s a good thing you can find at least a small amount of it in almost every food you eat, including protein, fruits and vegetables, and even some carbohydrates like rice.
That said, most foods only contain a very trace amount of vitamin B5. It may not be enough to give your body as much vitamin B5 as it truly needs unless you specifically target vitamin B5-rich foods.
Additionally, you can try certain supplements that are packed full of vitamin B5 to meet your daily recommended amount and get several other vitamins simultaneously. Supplements are helpful choices when you want to meet your vitamin benchmarks without drastically adjusting your diet.
For example, Hope Health’s Organic Greens supplement has several healthy foods as its key ingredients. Many of these foods include vitamin B5 and other positive elements like vitamin C, vitamin K, folate, vitamin A, and more. Such multipurpose vitamins could be great picks if you want to round out your nutrition quickly and easily – all while ensuring that you only put natural, organic compounds into your body.
On top of all that, certain topical creams or lotions may contain vitamin B5 to be absorbed directly by your skin. This may help bolster any skin-specific benefits.
Summary
Vitamin B5 is truly one of the most important vitamins for skin health and overall wellness. Making sure your body has enough vitamin B5 to maintain a strong skin barrier and optimal skin moisturization is key if you want to look and feel your best for years to come.
Fortunately, you can always make sure you get plenty of vitamin B5 with the right settlements from Hope Health. We offer a wide range of natural and organic supplement solutions for mind boosts, immune system strength, and more.
Sources:
Pantothenic Acid - Consumer | National Institutes of Health
Skin moisturizing effects of panthenol based formulations | NCBI