Good skincare, DeHaven states, is the only thing that really will protect the skin from environmental stresses adequately.
— You can’t get enough protection from inside your body to the skin. You have to also supply some. Only about 1%, at the most, of antioxidants that you eat get to the skin, she shares, continuing,
— Out of many causes of aging recognised, four of them have the main research support: free radicals, inflammation, glycation — protein damage, particularly collagen — and DNA damage. Now there are 12 causes, though many take off from these. For example, a lot of researchers say that we should not even talk about mitochondrial theory of aging, since it’s just a free radical theory of aging that we’re just hearing again.
— There are some things that are new and we know so much more now that you have to talk about them separately. For instance, disordered nutrient sensing didn’t become a theory of aging until recently. We’ve known that if your gut and gut microbiome get messed up, you have a problem. If you get older and you don’t absorb nutrients from your gut properly, that’s a problem. If you’re overweight or just getting older, you get more insulin resistant, which has become a theory of aging in and of itself. This is important in modern life, when insulin resistance is such a big problem.
Being a professional brand obviously enables iS Clinical to work with other types of products, with the help of professional guidance.
— There’s nothing like having an expert giving a professional opinion on what, for instance, the actinic keratosis on the skin means. That’s very important, rather than just assuming what you’re doing as a consumer and taking a treatment into your own hands, says Bryan Johns, President and CEO.
— What we’re trying to do with the skin is making the cell healthy, says Alec Call, Vice President and COO. All of our products are intended to help with that process in different ways, to help the cells replicate more properly and see the process of cell turnover being done in a more efficient manner. If we can help encourage that and make the cells more healthy, we see fewer and fewer disease states. We can also encourage better health of the skin from conditions like inflammation and pigment issues. It all starts with cellular health and when you’re trying to help the cell be its healthiest, all of the disease states are minimised.
— I’ve read three articles in the medical literature lately about aloe vera being recognised as a potential treatment of actinic keratosis, Charlene DeHaven continues. We use pharmaceutical-grade aloe which is better than what they used in those studies. Copper Tripeptide-1, which is in several of our products, sends anticancer messages to the genes.
— Back in the day, they used to recommend tretinoin for that, which had terrible side effects, Bryan Johns shares. Now, with the advancements in formulation sophistication, we can achieve the same end result but without damaging the surrounding tissue.
What else are you looking at right now in terms of ingredients and coming trends?
— This summer, we saw the picture of an orangutan that used medicinal leaves, chewed them up, and put them on as a poultice. We’re already investigating that plant and its properties. That’s how quickly we move, whereas sometimes, in bigger companies, it’s a corporate process and it would take two or three years to do that, says Johns. He continues:
— But to be honest, as a formulator, I might be working on something that I think is fantastic and then we have a new discovery the week after, so that I’ll shift my focus. It’s really hard to tell what’s gonna happen. Science is advancing so rapidly now and we’ll never rest on our laurels — what I tell you that I might be working on now is maybe not what we’ll come out with in the next year. Just think if this ’orangutan botanical’ comes out to be amazing, and we figure out how to use it, and it works with other things… What I can tell you is that we definitely will be working on genes, genetic upregulation and downregulation, and want to down-regulate harmful things, giving the body the blueprint and the signals to tell the cells what they do to be better.
— We and Charlene are looking at how certain studies prove that something is happening in our genes, Call explains. This started with our work with the NBCC (National Breast Cancer Coalition) and its Artemis project (bringing together breast cancer researchers and advocates, Ed’s note) when all the doctors said that it’s all genetic — ’the vaccines that we’re working on are all gene-related.’ Me and Brian asked ourselves, ’How could we apply this to skincare?’ And if we could, how are we going to demonstrate that it’s actually working? Someone could say that a product upregulated certain things and down-regulated the bad stuff. That’s great. But what about products that were working before? It’s no different. They were up-regulating and down-regulating too. It’s just that now we have something that can be proved; it either turns the gene on or off, or it doesn’t do anything. The difference is just the complexity of how we measure the results. Now, we can tell for sure.
— This, I think, will be the difference; more and more companies will start adopting such measurements in order to demonstrate that their claim has scientific validation through genetic testing.
— We were just at NBCC’s annual conference, Bryan Johns shares. There’s been a lot of investigation and pioneering from the Artemis project into microenvironments and how that influences tumour growth and migration of cells. That’s the kind of things we’re gonna be talking about: the micro-environments in our skin, what might be surrounding AKS (actinic keratosis), and what might be signalling the development of melanoma.
— Is there something we could do for that? To be honest, it’s hard because a lot of this is pharmaceutical activity and we’re a cosmeceutical. There are obviously things we can’t claim — that would be a pharmaceutical claim — but we’re gonna be talking a lot more about microenvironments, We’re learning so much now that we didn’t know a year ago.
— What we see for future trends is skincare based on strengthening and protecting the skin barrier against environmental stressors. Especially pro-, pre-, and postbiotics will continue trending, as well as antioxidant technology. Technologies focusing on prevention rather than treatment will be key. Especially anti-aging through prevention is bigger than ever, which also may be a part of the reason why the average skincare user is getting younger and younger. In addition to this, we see the end-user asking for simple routines with a big impact and fast results.
And when medical and skincare merge more and more, new questions can arise.
— Yes, and it’s a weird thing that the FDA knows that cosmeceutical companies do penetrate the skin but according to US law, you’re not allowed to penetrate, says Johns. But they know we do. We can say that we improve the appearance of fine lines or wrinkles, but we can’t say we improve them. Also weird. But FDA is overworked and undermanned. They don’t have enough funding. I feel really bad for them, they do the best they can.
— The EU regulatory, when deciding to control a substance, is interesting, says Call. Dealing in 120 countries, we deal with regulatory all over the world. The most difficult and arbitrary is the EU. Sometimes, they’ll say that they don’t like a certain ingredient — and they have absolutely no valid scientific reason for it. It’s a political thing here. We have to navigate this all the time, we have special formulas we make for the EU that we don’t use in any other part of the world because it has to be compliant. There are so many areas in Asia where we have to do the same thing, and we have to respect that. But if we see that there’s a particular ingredient that they (the EU) want to look at, we just want them to show us the valid independent clinical studies that support and substantiate the decision to control it. Some things are valid but a lot of times, it’s arbitrary. I understand that they’re here to protect, but they protect in a general way. Rather than saying that we can use this and that but the rest, we want to control, they just say none of it. There are a lot of hoops that we have to jump through. I know they have a hard time and a hard job but they are definitely ’control happy.’
— I think they’re proactively thinking they’re keeping the public safer that way. I’m sure that’s their motivation. But there are a lot of things that change back and forth all the time. We have a regulatory department and it takes someone who spends hours a week looking at just what’s happening with the EU. ’This is good now but next week it’s not.’ happens a lot. We just have to respect and not criticise it but it can be difficult for a company — for all companies — to navigate. It’s difficult for us too!
Over the years, you’ve also partnered with several philanthropic programs, including your own iS Cancer Care program. What have you learned from these years on how to use it in a reliable way in your marketing?
— That’s tricky, Call shares. It’s really hard to know sometimes whether an organisation has those social motivations authentically. Or whether they are just being down to try to satisfy their consumers and do just enough of it to make it look as if they’re green, socially responsible, support cancer research, or whatever the position is. It requires that a consumer dig a little deeper and not just take the face-value message but look at what is the history of this organisation’s philanthropy. If they just, in the last few years, started putting what a great philanthropist they are, how much they give, or how much they’re recycling. Or if it’s a company that has been doing many of those things from inception or the very beginning. It’s a little hard for a consumer to find historical information about philanthropy from a company — you might need to question whether that’s authentic or not!
