Skin Care Science

The skin care industry: The good, bad and beautiful!

The following pictures are sales sheets that skin care ingredient manufactures use when attempting to market their ingredients to the skin care formulators.

The skin care industry starts with these companies and moves toward skin care formulators / manufacturers. From there, these acitve ingredients find their way into the products you and your clients buy. I have found a few to be really good, but based on the the amount of time in clinical trials and usage in the medical field, most are not worth considering when compared to ingredients that are more mature. What is the problem with this philosophy of skin care? It is boring!

Boring = Lower Sales! To our point, the skin care industry, the actives that work over time and do improve the clients skin are known and have been known for a very long time. That is not to say that these new and improved ingredeints do not do the same or better, our point is and has always been: with so many and so much 'marketing' how are we to tell the difference and to understand what is hype and what is proven effective? Our answer and direction is to stick with the tried and true.

You as consumers can be very influenced by marketing and the message of new and improved; that drives sales and to our point boring and proven cannot easily compete.

The pictures below show a very popular active ingredient and how its claim is made to the skin care formulator and why it should be sold to the skin care manufacturer. We are not saying this is a bad ingredient or one that should not be used but the opinion is that if it does not have a real time test within the medical field for over a decade then maybe its not ready yet.

When you look at these pictures take a look at a few key points:

• No. 1 is important because it uses the word 'considered'.

• No. 2 shows the percentage the manufacturer should use when formulating.
Why this is important: The ingredient manufacturer does clinical trials - 28 days - at a specific percentage and then allows the skin care formulator to decide based on cost or preference as to how much is to be used. It should be set just like a drug and have the proper time test on human skin and across all skin types. Correct? This type of study takes decades in our opinion but here its a very short period of time.

• No. 3 explains what the name will be on the bottle wihin the ingredient deck when the active ingredient is used.

When you look at the studies please keep this in mind: 'In Vitro' means in the lab and NOT inside or on a human being. Think - 't' for test-tube, and then obviously 'In Vivo' means inside or on a human being.

We find this a very interesting part of the skin care industry and when we read these or see the same words on marketing material, we always ask myself the same question: Why has a major pharmaceutical company not patented this and made billions on it or why its use is not cited at medical or other high level skin care continuing education (CE) conventions in the US or around the world?

Here is a link on Ebay showcasing a few products that carry this ingredient: Ebay

This is also how ingredients filter to private label and how the 'white noise' of the marketing engine within the skin care industry works. The claims made by these active ingredient manufactures find their way directly to the media and the ads placed by major skin care manufactures within the industry.

If we watch the video on this link: Sny-ake we can see just how things get started within the media. If you ever wondered where the claims come from when you see a magazine ad for a product, these sheets are normally the source. What is more important is who is going to know if the skin care manufacturer embellishes a little on their marketing material?

Snap - 8 is also a very popular ingredient, so we thought it would be nice to show exactly what its details are as well. Take a look at what is highlighted in yellow. Again another active ingredient manufacture has done a test with 17 women over a 28 day period for its clinical trial. What is more interesting is the diagram to the right shows a silcon imprint for wrinkle reduction. This method in my opinion leaves room for error and and does not really show the real improvement. We have never personally seen this test in person or done it in any situation but just from life experience I am forming my own opinion. Allow me to explain: The skin has a topography or better said "Wrinkle Depth" and can be measured in many ways. The process for this clinical trial is to apply silicon, allow to harden and then read the inverse of that model impression to measure improvement. The issue is with each process- your skin, silicon application to the inverse for measurement you gain a measure of thickness that when measured would imply a wrinkle reduction. This is rather complicated but I hope I have done a good job of making it simpler to understand. In the end its up to the skin care line to determine the vailidity of these clinical trials, the ingredient and if it should or should not be used.

Although we do not show the product for the picture below, what we want to show is how the active ingredient manufacture will go so far as to actually create a product using their ingredient for a skin care product. Based on this, you can see the active ingredient is at its highest for this product: 5%. This amount is also what the clinical trials were based on but as you can see from the previous product literature, the percenatge to use has a range which the skin care manufacturer can decide for themselves. The important point is this: as long the skin care manufacturer puts at least the minimum amount, they can claim the full results based on the maximum amount used.

What is more alarming is that you can actually use less, like 0.5% , lower your cost of the manufacturing process and still make the claim since the oversite is almost non-existant.

Listed below are two web pages that showcase examples how this information is translated by the skin care marketing machine and eventually to you or your clients via the print media, tv and or as in these cases, the internet:

Sny-ake and Snap - 8 (Acetyl Octapeptide-3)

In Closing

No matter what product or product lines you choose, education is key. We hope this information helps make that decision easier and removes some of the 'white noise' and allows you to understand the industry as a whole better and with more depth.