What Ingredients Do I Need In My Skincare? How to Ignore the Ingredient Hype!

I frequently read articles by people offering guidance about skincare and skincare products that are based on hype. For me this misinformation provides a limited story without any true understanding of the science behind what is being recommended and the possible consequences of use.

I see skincare like medicine. If you understand how it’s going to work (“treatment”), understand the right products (“formulation”) for you and use it for the right amount of time(“the care plan”) , that’s when the magic happens (“the cure”). Making these choices yourself without expert advice or based on a view of perhaps a neighbour, a magazine, a glossy counter or dare I say (head in hands), the celebrities like Trinny!! These decisions are unlikely to give you the best outcome for you.  Your skin is unique and needs to be treated like that (“your bespoke prescription”).

I recently read an online article in Winchest_her magazine about skincare ingredients. What was interesting about this article is that getting the best out of your skin is simply not just a case of knowing the ingredients and adding them in but having an additional understanding about how those ingredients are related to your skin to fit into a skincare plan. Ingredients are an essential part of the skincare recipe, but how you mix them, bake them, what you bake them in and how long you apply them for, effects the outcome. Formulation is key: How much you need, and how it is formulated ensures you get the result you want.

Over the years, as my understanding of skincare has grown, I’ve come to believe that there are certain products that you should invest heavily in.  After the essential mineral based sunscreen, vitamin C and retinoids will keep your skin in amazing condition for years to come if used wisely. Never use a chemical based sunscreen on your face, always opt for mineral alternatives.   

In reality, what does that mean? We all have skincare products at home and through careful consultation we can tweak your existing plan and add in the additional ingredients to give you the best outcome.

Let’s start with Retinol

As a rule of thumb, if you’re buying a product over the counter and it ‘contains retinol’ the reality is that it does not contain a sufficient amount to give you the result you need. Supermarkets and shops can’t have members of the public reacting badly to products that they have bought over-the-counter and applied naively, which is a likely outcome if you have high-strength retinol and you start using it too quickly. My advice would be, do not buy retinol based products without asking a skincare consultant.

Don’t be put off though, there is so much scientific evidence supporting the benefits of retinol in skincare. Retinol supports your fibroblast cells (the cells that grow collagen) to build more collagen and more elastin, and since we are depleting collagen stores by about 1% every year from our mid-20s, this is the hero ingredient of a good skincare routine. Apply at night, sparingly after exfoliating, and build it up gradually, giving it10-15mins to soak right in before putting anything over it!  I love applying Alumier MD retinol at night to boost collagen and minimise pigmentation, fine lines and wrinkles.

Vitamin C

Take a peek at a recent video of mine, Vitamin C is complicated to explain but the video details everything you need to know! Vitamin C has a place in the pigmentation pathway so including it in your skincare routine helps to lighten and brighten the skin. However, that’s not the key magic! Vitamin C protects your skin from damage caused by UV. It does this by scavenging free radicals, and   it stops these free radicals taking electrons from other cells in your face further depleting your skin of collagen etc. Yes you can eat more of it, however it’s 20 times more effective if you put it directly onto your skin! Not surprisingly, since it’s clearly very reactive to light it’s an inherently unstable molecule, and that’s why it’s worth buying the very best you can afford. My favourite is Alumier MD. This formulation  contains both vitamin C and E which boosts its antioxidant properties! Mixed up with a peptide,  broken bits of protein, this actively encourages your skin to grow. What is particularly great about this vitamin C is that you mix it fresh each month so there has been absolutely no degradation at the point you start using it, giving your skin the greatest possible protection.

Collagen

We all need it and it is often added to skincare, and we think it’s going to make our skin plump and loaded with collagen but it’s not like this. Let me help you understand why this is never going to work. The first thing to understand is that the collagen that we want to have is collagen inside cells, it’s not collagen floating around on the surface of the skin. When we apply a product to the skin only molecules which are smaller than 500 Daltons  can be absorbed, but collagen is 10 000 Daltons. It’s not ever going to be absorbed but it’s a good (although massively expensive) surface moisturiser. So if anyone says that you need it in your skincare...use a retinol first! Get your cells to make the collagen in the right place, don’t try and just put it on top.

Hyaluronic acid,

This is going in a similar bucket to collagen! Some products will chop the hyaluronic acid strands up so that they can be absorbed but mostly the hyaluronic acid that you can buy  is a molecule far too big to be absorbed. It’s sold generally as a great surface moisturiser (a humectant), but if you inject it as part of a skin boosting program, then you’ll see the magic!

Perhaps that’s enough for now!  Let me know if a blog like this is interesting to you and I will write more.

What do you want to know about?