20 TRENDING TECHNOLOGIES
Taking a holistic view of beauty products
Giorgio Dell’Acqua - NYSCC Chair-Elect, US
Back in 2000, when I started my adventure as a cosmetic scientist and formulator working at a contract manufacturer, I was introduced to suppliers and brands that suggested ingestible ingredients as an effective treatment to improve the way our skin, hair and nails looked. We called it at the time the “inside-out” approach to beauty. Although I knew about the association of certain vitamins with skin and hair aspect and quality, the supplements were more complex, from collagen to carotenoids to different phytochemicals with issues related to release, stability, bioavailability, etc. Mostly because of the lack of sufficient clinical evidence and the challenge for suppliers operating in the cosmetic industry to support clinical trials addressing the inside-out approach, many of these ingredients went unnoticed in the bigger picture of beauty and made their way through the nutraceutical market with a certain success, focusing on general wellbeing or wellness. Back in the day, I believed that the predominant dogma of addressing skin care and hair care as a specific target using topical products, almost like skin and hair were disconnected from the rest of our body, slowed down the adoption of a more holistic approach, and the idea to address beauty through an inside-out intervention as well.
A holistic world The holistic view of our body has been explored and developed for thousands of years in TCM and Ayurvedic Practice and represents a philosophy of life. We are looking at interactions and equilibrium between our senses, our organs and our external world with its colours and smells, but also with its dangers (pollution and stress in all their forms). The notion that we are completely connected as individuals and with the environment is not surprising either. We just lived the disconnect for too long. There is a willingness to reconnect to ourselves, our communities and nature. Sounds familiar? This is very much in line with the principle of sustainability, but also with a holistic view of the world where individuals function better as communities. Connections are complex though and not necessarily linear. This is why it is risky to simplify; but in general, we can draw some essential concepts that I think are main takeaways when approaching the skin and hair as part of our body and subjected to its rules.
PERSONAL CARE June 2021
The scientist’s view First, embryology studies taught us that some organs derive from the same embryonic tissue. When we think about the brain, skin, hair connection we realise that all these organs are derived from the same ectoderm layer during embryogenesis. Although these organs eventually differentiate to assume morphology and function completely different from each other, they do share mechanisms and pathways that are similar and interconnected.
Some years ago, this basic understanding allowed scientists to develop concepts around the so-called neurocosmetics or the brain- skin-hair- axis.1,2
These concepts are becoming
more prevalent these days since they are helping us to understand how stress and our mind influence our body and our appearance. When stress, either internal (psychological) or external (environmental), hits us, it definitely has an impact on how our skin and hair looks. Although it is common sense, since we have experienced it in the past either ourselves or seeing on other individuals, science is helping now connecting the dots between stress, related neurotransmitters and a physiological change ultimately associated with a condition and/or an appearance (looking good or looking bad).
The intimate connection Stress has been part of my life earlier on (Buddhism believes that since stress or trauma starts with birth and never really goes away, we spend our lifetime to figure out how to reduce it or alleviate it with a goal of trying to reach a more balanced, happy state) and I am pretty sure that some of the specific pain I felt in some parts of my body when I was younger were created by my brain: also called a psychosomatic state. I am sure it may have happened to some
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