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"  Villa Monteorolio, a rambling olive farm overlooking the hills of Tuscany, is a place that could inspire a woman to take leave of her senses. Who could remember a journalistic endeavor in the midst of sun-dappled fields, crumbling terra-cotta, gently swaying cypress trees, and gallons of Chianti? Add to this equation one sleepy-lidded, soft-spoken local, Tommaso (picture an outdoorsy, Mediterranean Jake Gyllenhaal), and I&amp;#039;m adrift. Did I mention that this place was originally built for the family that commissioned the Mona Lisa? While his parents are away in Japan accepting an award for their celebrated olive oil, Tommaso is attempting, in adorably inept English, to explain the mysteries of their bright, greenish-hued liquid gold. I catch a few words\u2014artichoke? velvet? cardiology?\u2014but, let&amp;#039;s be honest, haven&amp;#039;t a clue what he&amp;#039;s talking about. And who cares? I&amp;#039;m far too busy trying to figure out how to tell my boyfriend I&amp;#039;ve canceled my return flight.  Oh, Tommaso, Tommaso. Our life will be super-bellissimo. It will be like A Room With a View, the Sequel. We&amp;#039;ll watch the frescoes peel, frolic in the vanishing pool, listen to your Andrea Bocelli CDs. Just the two of us and our 30 hectares...whatever hectares are.  But something is wrong. Tommaso rattles his keys, struggles to unlock the villa. &amp;quot;Mama,&amp;quot; he says, looking to the heavens for guidance. &amp;quot;Without her, I am lost.&amp;quot;  Mama? Hang on. Where am I? Right. Aging! Sagging! Wrinkles ! That&amp;#039;s what we&amp;#039;re here for. This quest began last March, in far less romantic environs: the American Academy of Dermatology (AAD) conference in San Francisco. That&amp;#039;s where I learned that my face was a ticking time bomb, ready to deflate in approximately 2.82 years. (Hey, I never promised you a love story.) You see, luxe Japanese skin-care brand SK-II had gotten its hands on a &amp;quot;skin compression imaging device&amp;quot;\u2014a high-tech cheek-pincher with the ability to calculate, for the first time, skin&amp;#039;s elusive qualities of elasticity and resilience. It may not sound that exciting, but as far as the AAD crowd was concerned, this was big. The idea was inspired by geography and the principles of plate tectonics; when compressed in this gadget, skin buckles, forming a landscape of ripples. &amp;quot;If you compress a 20-year-old&amp;#039;s and a 40-year-old&amp;#039;s skin with the same amount of stress and force, there&amp;#039;s a big difference,&amp;quot; says Laura Goodman, a senior scientist at P&amp;amp;amp;G Beauty, which owns SK-II. &amp;quot;The older woman will have major roller-coaster hills; the younger will only have the little bumps at the end of the roller coaster.&amp;quot;  Smaller ripples mean skin is stronger, firmer, better able to withstand pressure. That quality, or lack thereof, is what SK-II calls the &amp;quot;skin power quotient,&amp;quot; and it&amp;#039;s where things start to get scary. In a study of 100 women ages 25 to 55, skin power gradually declined throughout the subjects&amp;#039; twenties and early thirties, then precipitously dropped in their midthirties. Right around 35.09 years of age, to be exact. &amp;quot;At that point, there&amp;#039;s a loss of elasticity and thickness. You start to see textural changes, like wrinkles or sagging,&amp;quot; Goodman says. This discovery surprised even the study&amp;#039;s practitioners. &amp;quot;We expected that collagen and elastin, skin&amp;#039;s two main structural components, would degrade over time. But we honestly didn&amp;#039;t expect this kind of dramatic shift,&amp;quot; Goodman says. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s a tipping point.&amp;quot;  The term tipping point originated in the world of epidemiology, where it refers to the moment at which a virus outbreak reaches critical mass. Writer Malcolm Gladwell has said that his book of the same name is about &amp;quot;understanding why change so often happens as quickly and as unexpectedly as it does.&amp;quot; SK-II scientists theorize that skin&amp;#039;s tipping point occurs because, over time, it loses the ability to withstand the oxidation caused by UV rays, pollutants, and intrinsic stress. Damage builds up, and eventually collagen and elastin scaffolding can no longer hold it at bay. Once you know it&amp;#039;s out there, it&amp;#039;s hard to resist searching faces for signs of tipping. Not long after the AAD conference, I noticed a photo of a certain fashion icon whose eternally girlish look I have long idolized.  I&amp;#039;m not usually one to pity models, but the poor girl looked distinctly\u2014suddenly\u2014worse for wear. Was bad lighting to blame? Or a shift in skin power? Soon after, I visited the clinic of Kate Sommerville, the famous L.A. facialist. One of Sommerville&amp;#039;s disciples set to work applying firming masks and microcurrent treatments, all of which, she promised, would &amp;quot;tone and lift.&amp;quot; She finished me off with a dollop of serum. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s like topical Botox!&amp;quot; she enthused. &amp;quot;You really should take some of this home.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;Botox? I&amp;#039;m not ready for Botox,&amp;quot; I squeaked, clutching the sheet defensively. But mirrors don&amp;#039;t lie. Afterward, my eyebrows looked minutely higher. And wasn&amp;#039;t my jawline a wee bit more taut? Facialist miracles being wondrous but short-lived things, the little sags I&amp;#039;d never really noticed were back the next day. At 32, had I tipped already? &amp;quot;There definitely seems to be a point at which I see people start to have more rapid signs of textural and pigment changes, volume loss, all of the things we think of as aging,&amp;quot; says New York City dermatol\u00ADogist Anne Chapas, MD. Not even SPF-slathering derms are exempt. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m starting to see lines in my lower face as I&amp;#039;m entering my midthirties,&amp;quot; she admits. &amp;quot;I guess it&amp;#039;s time to think about combating them.&amp;quot; Chapas sees this sudden plunge as a sort of tug-of-war between genetics and lifestyle. &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s a point at which cells have seen so much environmental damage, they can&amp;#039;t keep up,&amp;quot; she says. After too much oxidative stress, cells stop dividing and go into senescence, a period in which they stop proliferating and growing; eventually, they die.  But is 35 the magic number? She&amp;#039;s not so sure. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t know if it&amp;#039;s necessarily in your midthirties,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;I think it depends on how much damage you&amp;#039;ve had. One of my patients is a 22-year-old sunbather from Myrtle Beach. I&amp;#039;m thinking, Oh my gosh, your skin&amp;#039;s going to be a wreck in five years.&amp;quot;  Indeed, how old we look and how old we are can be two different numbers. Last year, Est\u00E9e Lauder surveyed 600 women in an attempt to quantify skin&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;true&amp;quot; age. The study started out analyzing 77 variables that affect skin&amp;#039;s perceived age; eventually, that list was whittled down to the nine most important factors, from lines and age spots to rates of cell proliferation. Interestingly, only 65 percent of perception was visible; 35 percent was due to factors that are somehow noticeable, but hard to see, such as firmness and texture. &amp;quot;I totally notice a tipping point with my patients,&amp;quot; says dermatologist Jeanine Dow\u00ADnie, MD. But besides the usual agents\u2014tanning, smoking, or too much alcohol or coffee, which she says dehydrate skin\u2014Downie identifies an unexpected culprit: calories. &amp;quot;Many people in their midthirties start gaining weight for the first time,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;Patients come in talking about their face, when the problem is their weight. It starts fluctuating more, and that can lead to sagging.&amp;quot;  Depressing, right? I was beginning to picture the tipping point as more of a tipping over, a nightmarish, slo-mo tumble into an abyss of droopiness. (In this vision, my jowls\u2014hooked midplunge on a tree branch, \u00E0 la Tom and Jerry\u2014are the only thing that save me.) But perhaps knowing that each of us may be facing a tipping point isn&amp;#039;t just grounds for panic. It could be the best argument for prevention yet. Slapping on a little sunscreen seems the least we can do in the\u2014ahem\u2014face of disaster.  &amp;quot;You can&amp;#039;t control your genetics, but you can control environmental stress,&amp;quot; Chapas says. To fend off the waves of free radicals that chomp up our collagen and generally wreak cellular havoc, &amp;quot;start with heavy-duty antioxidants, both orally and topically, in your twenties,&amp;quot; she says.  Which brings us back to darling Tommaso. Did you think I&amp;#039;d forgotten him?  SK-II identified 27 genes (out of about 28,000 on the human genome) that are known &amp;quot;biomarkers&amp;quot; linked to skin oxidation. Like on-off switches, they tell our cells how to cope with stress. They also either decrease or increase this stress-response activity over time, thus our self-defense system work less and less efficiently\u2014hello, genetic aging. SK-II looked at hundreds of ingredients\u2014including retinol and glycolic acid\u2014to find the one that had the most noticeable effect on this skin-security system. The winner? You guessed it: an olive extract from a farm near Tommaso&amp;#039;s in Tuscany. Turns out the hardy plant, which has inspired countless myths and is the cornerstone of heart-healthy eating (and which many a wise Italian nonna still uses to soothe sore throats and settle upset stomachs), is a potent twenty-first-century anti-ager.  In vitro tests of the extract showed genetic markers for increased antioxidant capacity, plus a boost of activity in the genes that control a family of enzymes known to aid the body&amp;#039;s internal antioxidant supply. And, based on the &amp;quot;skin power quotients&amp;quot; of 89 women, using the new olive-extract-infused Skin Signature cream for four weeks pushed back probable tipping points by three to four years. SK-II may have put a name on the tipping point, but it&amp;#039;s not alone in trying to help us prepare for it\u2014or attempt to reverse it. Two new time-fighters tap into wound-healing technology. Clarins Multi-Active Day Early Wrinkle Correction aims to strengthen the skin of women ages 25 to 35 (according to the company, after that the challenge is to repair damage that&amp;#039;s already been done). The cream contains ambiaty, a leafy shrub that Madagascans have relied on to treat wounds for generations.  At the recent Society for Investigative Dermatology conference in Montreal, Avon targeted activin, one of the body&amp;#039;s messenger molecules. When we suffer a cut or an abrasion, activin stimulates skin to release its repair troops. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s like that sign on the fire extinguisher: IN CASE OF EMERGENCY BREAK, GLASS,&amp;quot; says Avon Senior Scientist Anthony Gonzalez. With the company&amp;#039;s latest breakthrough, Anew Reversalist, &amp;quot;We want to do that all the time, not just when you get cut.&amp;quot; The result, he says, is &amp;quot;fresh cells, skin that acts as it did when you were younger&amp;quot;\u2014so that wrinkles are repaired with the same efficacy as a child&amp;#039;s skinned knee. Sounds good to me. But should that fail, you can find me in Tuscany. Tommaso doesn&amp;#039;t seem like the type to be put off by a woman teetering past her tipping point. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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