Well, hello, hello, guys. You're listening to Beauty Bites with Dr. K, Secrets of a Plastic Surgeon,

and it's time for a five-minute

Friday. Today, let's talk about microplastics. This is such an ominous and scary topic because I've

seen so much social media posting about it and literally freaks me out to understand how much plastic

we've ingested as a human species. It's more invisible

than you might think. Microplastics are things that were exposed to every single day. And you

might be wondering how does this affect me? How is it relevant? But I'm going to tell you about it.

It's very relevant to your skin, to your aging process, to every single organ

in your body, and to our longevity. In the simplest terms, microplastics are small, tiny, tiny

little plastic fragments, usually between one nanometer and up to five millimeters in size,

but they come from broken down bigger plastic materials.

But just to give you an idea of how tiny they might be, if you look at a strand of human

hair, it's about 80,000 nanometers wide. And we're talking to one nanometer or even smaller

micron-sized particles. Microplastics are very bad for the environment and the ecosystem,

and they're also showing up in places like human tissues in the brain, in the skeletal system.

They're showing up in breast milk. They're showing up in particles floating in the air,

floating in water, and the cosmetic products we're using every

single day. So how do microplastics actually affect your skin? Well, your skin, your body's

largest organ, you know. It's also your first line of defense against environmental factors,

whether it's pollution or ultraviolet rays or toxins, and the skin is also your first defense

against microplastics. When small particles get absorbed into your skin, they land on your

skin. They may be in the pollution or the air around us. You may be touching these fabrics and

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