What Does Glycolic Acid Do?

[Nouveaunew]

I’m alternating between glycolic acid toner and vitamin C toner every second night as I have so much of them to use up I cannot justify paying out for retinol right now.

Are they good enough substitutes? I’m in my early 40s. I caught a glimpse of myself in the rearview mirror earlier and got a bit of a shock, I’ll admit

Glycolic acid is an exfoliant.
Vitamin c is an anti oxidant that helps protect against sun damage and free radicals. It can help stimulate collagen but there is not a lot of independent evidence on this.
A retinol increases the skin turnover and helps produce more collagen.
Vit c and and glycolic acid can't replace tretinoin.

I once heard tretinoin explained like this.
When you're under 20/25, your skin has sn instruction manual on how to produce collagen that keeps your skin firm and wrinkles at bay. It happily follows the manual and your skin looks good.
By the time you get into your 30s, the instruction manual has lost a few pages, but your skin's doing the best it can and it's not doing a bad job.
By the time you get into your 40s, there are a lot of pages missing. The skins not totally sure what it's doing so it misses a few steps here and there.
In your fifties there aren't many pages left
In your sixties, your skin doesn't even know where the manual is.
However, using tretinoin is like filling in the missing bits from the instruction manual so the skin can produce collagen for longer.
And vit c and GA can't do that.

@moonbedazzled

And thus I make plans to renew my Tretinoin prescription!

Thank you so much