Should we be drinking anti-aging collagen tea? That’s the question I was asking myself having seen a supplier of specialist supplement materials suggesting that we should take them up on exactly that proposition. Collagen is one of the longest standing cosmetic buzzwords and it has been turning up on ingredient lists, in marketing copy and …
Collagen has always been a promising skincare active, but a new form of it,Nature Identical Collagen, might finally fulfill that promise.
Our bodies are engaged in a continual battle against oxygen. Oxygen breaks down anything complex. It makes fats go rancid. It cleaves and disorders proteins. It wrecks DNA. So basically our bodies are targets of oxygen molecules. We need to defend against them, and the workhorse of that defence is vitamin E. A third of …
I was musing this morning that even though blogs in general (and my blog in particular) are not always that well written and have no kind of quality control and are generally a bit rough round the edges nonetheless they are quite compelling things to read. I think the reason for this is that they …
The excitable chaps who cover beauty over at the Daily Mail have gone even more effervescent than usual over the latest expensive skin serum. And when I say expensive I mean expensive – a four week course costs £600 (€750, $940). That is well over half the amount a full time worker on the minimum …
Nobody knows exactly why we age. One popular theory is that staying alive is simply too hard to keep it up for long. We have large and complicated bodies full of intricate chemicals, all of which are under constant attack from oxygen in the atmosphere. It is a bit like a ship in the middle …
The pace of scientific advance over the last couple of centuries has been astonishing. Innovations have poured out of laboratories and workshops transforming our lives forever. Many of these new ideas that have shaped the modern world have also at some stage been used as marketing stories by the cosmetic industry. A great example is …
Retinol is one of a number of vitamin A derivatives that is used in pharmaceutical and cosmetic products. When I wrote about it last time I glossed over one of its drawbacks. Along with the rest of the vitamin A family overdosing can have some very serious health issues. Vitamin A is fat soluble and …
A question from my first Twitter chum, Musicalhouses. Dear Colin, How can we guess how much retinol there is in a skincare product? It’s quite hard to get a percentage ge since companies don’t disclose this. In particular, I’m looking at the Hada Labo Retinol Lifting and Firming Lotion (Ingredients: water, butylene glycol, glycerine, PEG-20 …
Matrixyl has been in the news. There have been a couple of stories this week in the Mail and the Mirror. The effectiveness of an anti-wrinkle ingredient has been scientifically proven. Journalists have been onto me asking for comments, so it seems to have struck a chord at least in the media. Let’s unpack it …
