PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To provide a skin care preparation for external use having a combination of excellent skin-beautifying and brightening effects and high biological safety through compounding such an ingredient as excellent new skin-beautifying and brightening one having been found in natural matter and keeping the skin in youthful and healthy conditions or improving the skin to such conditions by exhibiting excellent prophylactic and ameliorative effects on skin-aging phenomena including wrinkles, flabbiness and freckles and also slight in irritancy to the skin and high in biological safety as well.SOLUTION: The skin care preparation for external use includes sweet potato-derived "sho-chu" (Japanese white distilled liquor) lees or extract thereof as an active ingredient and has a protein-saccharifying-inhibitory effect, fibroblast-activating effect, collagen production-promoting effect and tyrosinase activity-inhibitory effect.
