The urge to be young, or at least to look young, is so strong that most of us will happily take home an armful of whatever is currently touted as the best wrinkle cream. But what if we decide to approach the subject scientifically?

The average person can be forgiven if she - or he, for that matter - feels thoroughly confused after even a cursory research pertaining to answer the question: what is the best anti wrinkle cream? With so many creams claiming to be able to magically erase our lines, how do we decide which one is worthy of being taken to the check-out point?

The confusion is due to the wealth of choices. The manufactures are driven to come up with always new combinations of ingredients that claim to be able to diminish the appearance of wrinkles. Yes, we know - or should know by now - that the only wrinkle cream that carries the official stamp of is the good old vitamin A cream, Retinol.

But the process of approving Retinol is not making much progress. This is causing the older consumer population to come up penniless and hopeless as they search through the stores amongst the medicines that seem to repopulate and reform each day.

In truth, the variety of creams and the chemicals in each one help dissolve age with each application, so there's no way to prove on any one elder whether a certain cream works better or not. The mysteries of the strange new creams continue to lay dormant.

Besides the vitamin A based creams, it is generally considered that the best wrinkle cream of today is the cone that contains AHA (alpha hydroxyl acids), antioxidants (based on derivatives of vitamins A, C and E), coenzyme Q10, collagen or copper. The newest ingredient being touted as "magical" is the orchid extract. Of course, it is impossible to put all those ingredients together in one all-powerful cream for eradicating wrinkles.

Therefore, your best bet would be to periodically change from a cream that contains one type of wrinkle-fighting ingredient to a cream that contains another type of wrinkle-fighting ingredient. That way, your skin will over time get a variety of possibly beneficial ingredients. It is often a good idea to go by what your friends recommend, even though what is the best anti wrinkle cream for your friend is not necessarily the best for your specific skin type. Listen to your skin, and it will soon tell you what it likes and what it does not like!

Having said that, it is also important to emphasise that you will not find a satisfactory answer to the question - what is the best anti wrinkle cream - if you keep buzzing from one cream to the next, potentially even better one. Make an informed choice, and then stick with it for at least three months. People in the know say that the most common cause of an anti-aging cream not fulfilling its promise is that we, the users, do not stick with it long enough.