Colloidal Silver Skin Care

Does your skin speak? Yes, it does in its own way. It communicates with a glow or a lack thereof. It communicates with pimples, lesions, freckles, age spots and wrinkles or lack thereof. A dilemma arises when your skin is “screaming” zits and everything you had done topically has not calmed it down. 

 It is everything you put in your mouth, chew and swallow. Unfortunately, there are no shortcuts and anyone who assures you that there are shortcuts is misleading you. Your most important skin-care routine is your daily nutrition, which includes proper hydration, which itself includes adequate whole salt replenishment (see book reviews #1 through #4).

I review only books and articles on PubMed Central that deal exclusively with health and disease topics, which go far beyond topical skin care. With the information posted you should be able to create a healthy lifestyle for yourself, which will in the end affect the beauty of your skin.  Anything applied topically should be considered as adjuvant-skin care.

In the book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, by Dr. Westin Price makes a compelling argument that nutrition is transgenerational. This means that what your mother and father both ate has an effect on the physical construction and function of your body. What you eat will affect your children in the same manner. Dr. Price noted that among secluded populations (in the 1930s) the physical integrity was impressive, even at an old age, but once the first road was built and packaged foods flooded in, the health of the population degenerated and it often began with painful dental issues. Since dentistry was not developed well back then many of those affected by dental pain committed suicide. 

Dr. Price pointed out that the offspring of the generation that strayed away from their traditional natural foods had clear changes in their skeletal construction. These were smaller dental arches which could no longer accommodate all the teeth and consequently resulted in a pointy chin and crooked teeth. The women who previously gave birth without effort began having difficulties due to a narrower birthing canal at the skeletal level. As a result, hospitals sprang up in these areas and cesarean sections were initiated. These are just the changes that were apparent with the naked eye, which begs the question, what are the changes that are not visible with the naked eye? These kind of problems cannot be reversed even with the best nutrition because it has to do with the physical formation of your body in utero. However, proper nutrition will prevent any further problems or degeneration of the physical body.

Skin creams are not a substitute for nutritional skin care, but they can give a helping hand. Poor nutrition leads to unhealthy looking skin mainly by promoting the proliferation of bad bacteria and fungi that are part of the natural microbiome of the skin but kept in check by good microbes. However, please keep in mind that even the good bacteria can behave badly if for their nutrition you provide (in your diet) worthless food-like substances. In this case, the end-products of their metabolism, which under normal circumstances would be the b-complex vitamins for example, will now be harmful end products. So, this is how your good microbiome transforms into a pathogenic one that feeds off you with no benefit to you what so ever. Now you your skin is “screaming” zits, lesions, age spots, wrinkles or other complications, and it certainly has no glow.

One of the ways that a topical preparation can help is by killing off some of the pathogens on your skin. However, if you don’t practice nutritional skin care, you will always find yourself in a race against these entities regardless of which topical product you use. Colloidal silver has a long history of use but it has fallen out of favor for two reasons, 1-silver cannot be patented and 2- the process of making it at home is very easy. Essentially, it is a financial threat, a small threat, but still a threat to big profits. And certainly the big profiteers don’t want any new fads taking hold such as people making their own remedies at home, be it colloidal silver or growing an herbal garden. 

Chemical skin peels damage the structural integrity of your skin and if you have poor nutritional-skin care your body will have very little “fire power” to regenerate. Additionally, these peels allow undesirable pathogens living on your skin, or in the environment, to get access to the deeper layers of your skin. I am not a fan of these preparations and I will always recommend against such skin abuse.

Use a mild soap for cleansing, preferably a soap that has the bare ingredients needed to make a soap. These are fat (tallow or plant oils), water and a base (generally sodium hydroxide). If there is a long list of “crud” listed as ingredients, don’t use it especially if they are "hidden" behind their chemical names.

While your skin is still a little damp after washing, apply the cream of your choice. Your cream of choice should only have the bare minimum of ingredients required to make a cream (oils, sometimes water, emulsifiers and the ingredient you are preparing; the cream I make is an example). However, if the cream contains something additional that is known to be beneficial, that’s fine. Again, avoid a cream with an extensive list of ingredients that are hidden behind their chemical names. Unfortunately, due diligence is required even when selecting something as seemingly benign as a cream. Many compounds absorb right through the skin.

Every so often, for the complete care of your whole skin take a bath in baking soda. You can use half a cup of baking soda per bathtub and soak for about an hour. You will notice that your skin has a slippery feeling while you are soaking. Gently rubbing or scratching your skin while soaking will help to loosen the dead, often fungus-overgrown, top layer of skin. These will come off like little short noodles. The more noodles you drop into the tub the better. Wet your face as well but don’t scratch, rub gently instead to loosen any "noodles." 

Adding a cup of Epsom salt (magnesium sulfate) to the tub gives additional benefits to the skin along the same lines mentioned. After your first soak you will notice an increased softness of your skin. Baking soda contains sodium bicarbonate, which increases the pH of the water. An elevated pH is something that fungal pathogens do not like so in this manner you will rid yourself of these undesirable guests.

Colloidal silver and ionic silver are NOT the same. Colloidal silver is metallic silver broken up into tiny nanoparticles and these particles do not have an electric charge (loss of electrons), noted as Ag on the periodic table of elements. Colloidal silver nanoparticles are suspended in the water. Ionic silver particles have an electric charge of +1, are noted as Ag+ and are dissolved in water as opposed to suspended. 

When ingesting (by mouth) ionic silver it reacts with hydrochloric acid in the stomach and most of the silver ions form silver chloride, which has no therapeutic properties. The remaining amount of silver ions (having a positive electrical charge) become attracted to the first healthy human cells they come in contact with (human cells have a net negative electric charge around it). The bulk of the silver ions will be removed and sequestered in the cells of the stomach and gastrointestinal tract. Some ions will remain and will be absorbed into the blood. Most of the silver ions in the blood will be removed by the liver and excreted in the bile. But some silver ions still remain and circulate in the blood and some of them will be reduced (given an electron to make it metallic silver or colloidal) by glucose and other reducing agents in the blood. Other silver ions will enter healthy cells and remain there unable to kill any pathogens. The silver ions are also unable to escape from inside the cells because they have bonded with sulfur and selenium normally found inside the cells. This type of intracellular accumulation of silver can lead to Argyria, which is where the skin becomes blue. Most case reports of Argyria have occurred with ionic silver not colloidal. 

A very small amount of reduced silver (colloidal silver) remains in the blood available to kill pathogens. Although colloidal (metallic) silver has no electrical charge (resulting from an electron loss) there is a net negative charge around the particle (zeta potential) and since healthy human cells have a net negative charge the colloidal silver and the human cells repel each other so no silver can enter inside the cells to cause any damage. Since bacteria carry a net positive charge the silver particles as they approach a bacteria will be attracted to it. When the silver particle and the pathogen are in very close proximity an electron from the silver particle can jump to the surface of the pathogen like a lightning bolt. This bursts the wall of the pathogen. Simultaneously, the silver atom that lost its electron becomes a silver ion (Ag+) and becomes released from the silver particle and this silver ion can enter the pathogen to damage it more. It may take more than one electron to destroy the pathogen and luckily silver nanoparticle may have thousands of silver atoms (not ions) in it.

The best way to distinguish ionic silver and colloidal silver is as follows:

1) Ionic silver is silver oxide made by passing current through silver wires in water. Silver oxide is not very soluble in water but the little that does dissolve creates the silver ion and oxide ion. Ionic silver solution is clear in color and has a metallic taste.

2) Colloidal silver nanoparticles are tiny spheres of pure silver dispersed (suspended) in water. The suspended particles give the water a yellow color and it is tasteless.

Using colloidal silver instead of ionic silver yields the best colloidal silver cream and it will be most effective! Unfortunately, most commercial products are in fact ionic silver.