Ep 316 – The Rogue Pharmacist: Understanding Active Ingredients

0:00:00.3 Benjamin Knight Fuchs: Calling all forward thinking estheticians, it's time to redefine the art of skincare and embrace a revolutionary approach that begins with your clients' skin cell health. I'm pharmacist Benjamin Knight Fuchs welcoming you to Truth Treatments Systems where beauty begins at the cell. We believe you're not just a beauty professional, you are a healthcare professional. You want to make a positive difference and you want to make a good living and we will help you do both. We're here to support your out of the box thinking and empower you to question traditional products, outdated formulations and old school ingredients. Imagine a world where solutions to the skin's enigmatic conditions lie just beyond the horizon. At Truth, we're not just a skincare brand, we're a movement that encourages you to explore better solutions and find that aha moment that changes the game. You are an artist and a healer of the skin and we're here to provide the canvas and the tools for you to create tailored protocols leaving generic ones in the past. Sign up now at truthtreatmentspro.com and receive two complimentary mineral rich electrolyte sheet masks. That's truthtreatmentspro.com where healthy skin is beautiful skin.

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0:01:12.3 Maggie Stasik: Hello and welcome to ASCP and the Rogue Pharmacist with Benjamin Knight Fuchs. In each episode we'll explore how internal and external factors can impact the skin. I'm Maggie Stasik, ASCP's program director, and joining me is Ben Fuchs, skincare formulator and pharmacist. Hey, Ben.

0:01:28.6 BF: Hello, Maggie. Good to see you.

0:01:30.5 MS: Good to see you. Active ingredients play a key role in skincare, but they can be tricky to navigate. Ben, can you help us understand what active really means?

0:01:40.3 BF: What active really means? Great question. Active means something's happening, but within that umbrella definition, making things happen, there's different sub definitions. So it kind of depends on what you want to happen. Two broad categories of sub definitions could be making things happen or stopping things from happening. So under the umbrella term of activity, you have active ingredients or activity that makes things happen or activity that shuts things down. Typically, shutting things down is a lot easier than making things happen. In fact, if you make things happen in the skin for the most part, I'll tell you some exceptions here, if you truly make things happen on the skin, you're in the realm of drugs. And this is why skincare companies will play with this gray area of implying that things are happening without actually stating that things are happening. And I'm gonna subdivide this make things happen here in a moment. But suppressing things or inhibiting things or stopping things, that's a little easier to do. And there's a lot of ingredients that will do that. And there's also a lot of ingredients that will protect the skin. Now, do you say protection is activity? It's a judgment call.

0:02:53.3 BF: I don't personally think it's activity, and I don't even really think that suppression or inhibition is activity. I think making things happen is activity. So I'll talk about that in a moment. But in the subcategory of suppressing or protecting, you have things like aloe vera, zinc oxide, calamine, green tea extract, epigallocatechin, and antioxidant type ingredients. Those calm the skin down. The reason those are not considered to be problematic is because it's much easier for an ingredient to suppress than it is to stimulate activity. To stimulate activity, you really gotta know what you're doing, because the activity is happening at the level of the cell. Protection doesn't have to happen at the level of the cell. For example, you can just superficially cover the skin and then you're gonna get some protection. Or there are certain herbs that contain antioxidants, bioflavonoids and carotenes and such that will kind of calm the tissue down without getting right into the cell. To get into the cell is really where true activity comes from. And that requires understanding what a cell needs. The good news is a cell doesn't need a lot of stuff. Now, before I can even get into that, and I'm talking about that here in a second, we want to also make a distinction between tactile and what I call biologic response modifiers, or BRMs.

0:04:11.1 BF: BRMs are things that change biology. Tactile ingredients are perceived as being active, but they're not necessarily active. And the classic example is moisturizers. Like, you'll rub a moisturizer on your skin and you'll go, oh, I'm moisturized. That's not really activity. That's like a wax and an oil that's on the surface of your skin that you're feeling. You haven't really done anything. And skincare companies understand that there are certain ingredients that have a tactile sensation, that have a sensual nature to them. And they understand that the consumer will collapse in their mind that tactile sensation with activity. Classic example, as I say, is moisturizers, also eye creams. Eye creams are classic for this. You put an eye cream on and you go, oh, I did something to my eyes. No, you just put some silicon and some slick sensation on your eyes and that's all you've done. You've created a superficial change. Ironically, in the long run, occlusion or putting things on the surface of the skin can actually suppress activity and have a negative effect. But that's another story we can talk about later. True active ingredients are ingredients that will stimulate cells to do things, make collagen, for example, divide, for example, secrete various growth factors, for example.

0:05:19.4 BF: These functions or activities require interacting with the cell. And there's a lot of ingredients that will interact with the cell. The most important, in my opinion, the most important ingredients that will interact with the cell are essential nutrients. Now, you know I love nutrition. I'm a nutritionist even as much as I am a skincare chemist. And in fact, my Truth treatments and all my formulations leverage topical nutrition. Because at the end of the day, a cell has a menu from which it eats from, if you will. It's not going to take things in that it doesn't recognize or that it doesn't need. What does it recognize and what does it need? Basically, for the most part, the combination of what it recognizes, what it needs are nutrients, specifically essential nutrients. The word essential in nutrition means you have to have it in your diet, you have to have it from the outside, cause your body can't make it. And there are some 80 or so or 90 or so, depending on who you ask, essential nutrients that are minerals, amino acids, fatty acids and vitamins. Those are going to be the most important ingredients for my favorite term in biochemistry, I'll tell you right now, upregulation, making things happen.

0:06:26.8 BF: Whenever I say upregulation, people get all confused because it sounds kind of chemistry and biology and stuff, but basically it means, it's making things happen. Downregulation means shutting things down. Upregulation means making things happen. As a formulator and as estheticians, we're interested in upregulation at the level of the cell. The way to do that, the best way to do that, the most effective way to do that and the gentlest and most non toxic way to do that is with the essential nutrients, but not all the essential nutrients, specifically minerals, ionic minerals have an ability to enter into cells and pass through the stratum corneum, which is a whole nother story, how you're going to get to the stratum corneum, to the cell. Because the stratum corneum is a barrier. And so your active ingredient, it's not enough to have an ingredient that will interact with the cell. You got to figure out how to get that ingredient to the cell so it can interact with it. Ionic minerals are great. I use them in a lot of my formulations because they penetrate, A, and they penetrate into cells.

0:07:28.1 BF: In fact, they penetrate into cells so effectively that they'll allow the penetration of other ingredients. They support the penetration of other nutrients. That's why they're a perfect pairing with other active ingredients. Essential fatty acids, likewise, those can penetrate through the cell, or penetrate through the skin, stratum corneum and get into a cell, and then amino acids a little bit, not as much. But the most important upregulating ingredients are the vitamins. And on top of that, deficiencies in vitamins are very common. Now, not all vitamins are going to have a cellular effect, but two stand out in importance. And every esthetician knows, in fact, these days, every consumer knows. The two most important active ingredients by far and away are the two vitamins that interact with the cell not only to get into the cell, but even into the genetics, which is pretty darn amazing. And that is real activity. And of course that's vitamin C and vitamin A. And vitamin C and vitamin A are so important for anybody who's interested in anti aging the skin and keeping the skin healthy and making corrections in unhealthy skin and of course for estheticians that in my opinion that if you're stranded on a desert island and you can only bring two ingredients for your skin, vitamin C and vitamin A.

0:08:42.6 BF: Now, it's not quite that simple because there's different forms of vitamin C and there's different forms of vitamin A, there's fat soluble vitamin C and water soluble vitamin C. So you gotta understand those. But by far and away the most important active ingredients are gonna be vitamin C and vitamin A. Vitamin E is important for protecting the cell, but, you know, is it protection activity? I'm not sure if you could consider protection to be activity. I forgot to mention niacin, vitamin B3, that's also another very important active ingredient. And while it's not as important as vitamin C and vitamin A probably, it's still got a lot of functionality. And niacin is another, I would call active ingredient for the skin. Vitamin D as well. Vitamin D is important for helping cells divide appropriately, also supporting calcium, the absorption of calcium into cells. And then vitamin K has got some blood or circulatory benefits. The B complex in general, aside from Niacin vitamin B3, can have some benefits, but not a lot of benefits. I wouldn't call them active. The most important, other than niacin, the most important topical B vitamin is Pantothenic acid, which is used as dexpanthenol.

0:09:48.2 BF: You'll see that sometimes. Or calcium pantothenate. Those don't really have cellular activity per se, although they may have some skin softening effects, which I wouldn't consider to be activity. Then there's the indirect activity, ingredients that provide indirect activity. The ingredients I just mentioned, they will actually interact with the cell itself, presuming that they get to the cell, which is, you know, that's another story. But there's also ingredients that can indirectly affect the cell. In fact, this one class of ingredients that I'm thinking that indirectly affects the cell, actively affects the cell, is so important that in a way it has really created the whole profession of estheticianship. Before this ingredient became popular, there were estheticians, but it wasn't really a thing to be an esthetician. There weren't a lot of beauty schools or esthetician schools. It wasn't like there were estheticians everywhere. This one class of ingredients revolutionized skincare. And I as a pharmacist, I had been working with this class of ingredients before everybody knew about it because I was getting prescriptions for it. But right around 1990, I don't know, you know, you probably weren't around being an esthetician back then, this ingredient came out, this class of ingredients came out and changed skincare because it was active, but it was indirectly active. And that is alpha hydroxy acids.

0:11:08.9 MS: Of course I know that.

0:11:10.0 BF: Right?

0:11:10.3 MS: Yeah.

0:11:10.8 BF: Of course you know that, right. Before alpha hydroxy acids, there weren't a lot of estheticians. All of a sudden when alpha hydroxy acids came out, it revolutionized skincare because all of a sudden estheticians or cosmeticians, if you will, and home users, consumers, had an active ingredient they could use in their home. Previous to that, everything that was active you'd have to get from a prescription. And basically it was just a retinoid. There wasn't really vitamin C products back then. Certainly there were no ionic mineral products. Skincare was really in the stone ages before 1990, 1991 when Alpha Hydroxy acids came out. What alpha hydroxy acids do and what they did and kind of changed everything is they allowed you to access the cell indirectly by accessing the stratum corneum. In other words, by disturbing the stratum corneum, you send signals down to the fibroblasts that make the collagen and the keratinocytes that make the moisture factors and create the barrier that said, hey, shingles are missing from the roof. Let's get going. We need some production here. In other words, they imitated wounding. And this is how they work. They initiate wound healing and repair, and by initiating wound healing and repair, they have their anti aging benefits, more collagen, more elastin, more moisture factors, a strong barrier, et cetera.

0:12:30.0 BF: And so these indirect active ingredients, if you will, they're active, but they're indirect, they sort of bypass the idea that in order for something to be active, it had to be a drug. That's, by the way, how nutrients work. Nutrients bypass this idea that in order for something to be truly active, it's a drug, so that if you use nutrients for your activity or alpha hydroxy acids for your activity, you can bypass this kind of FDA regulation that says that if something really creates a change in the skin, it's a prescription drug. That's kind of the distinction that the FDA makes between cosmetics and drugs is if you're really making a change, they don't use those terms, but if you're really making a change, it's a drug. If you're only beautifying or enhancing, it's a cosmetic. Nutrients, vitamins, minerals, amino acids, fatty acids and alpha hydroxy acids are a gray area that allows the esthetician and the consumer to bypass this kind of drug requirement or criteria, drug criteria that says that if something really creates a change in the skin, it's a drug.

0:13:30.2 BF: So cut to the chase, long story short, you've got BRMs that are really, really active. Those are going to be your essential nutrients. The cell's not stupid. It's not going to take everything in. In fact, it's not going to take very much in except for vitamin C, vitamin A and a few other things, maybe. And secondary active ingredients or indirect active ingredients like the alpha hydroxy acids and then the, I don't know, pseudo-active ingredients, you could say, that protect and soothe, but I don't really consider those activity because they're more like suppressing things. I guess a case could be made that they're activity, but really for the esthetician who's looking for active, they're looking for the stimulation, making things happen. And then there's the superficial things that pretend like they're active silicon and oils that make the consumer feel like, oh, I'm doing something to my skin when indeed you're just feeling the product. There's nothing really happening to the skin. And then there's the growth factors and the peptides, which just came out about 20 years ago when we figured out, I don't know, do you remember the Human Genome Project?

0:14:28.4 MS: I do, yeah.

0:14:29.0 BF: So the Human Genome Project that took place in the 1990s where they tried to see what genes were doing what. Now, as it turns out, genetics is a lot more complicated than that. But they got a whole library of genes that could make different proteins. When they figured that out, and the technology of what's called recombinant DNA, where you take a gene, stick it into a bacteria, had the bacteria make the product advanced, they started to explore the idea of using genetics to produce things that the body makes that are signaling molecules. And these are molecules that don't go into the cell, but they signal to the cell to do things and make things. And those are your growth factors and peptides. The problem with growth factors and... There's a few problems with growth factors and peptides. First of all, they don't penetrate through the skin very effectively. So you got to... The manufacturers will do kind of tweaks to the molecule, particularly with peptides, to get them to penetrate. Growth factors really aren't going to penetrate very effectively unless you have wounding, like post treatment kind of thing, post laser, post peels. And in that case, growth factors can have some benefits.

0:15:32.1 BF: The problem with these growth factors and peptides is they require the cell to be healthy in order for them to respond appropriately. In fact, if a cell is not healthy and you try to use peptides and growth factors, either you're not going to get a lot of benefit or they can actually be counterproductive. You don't want unhealthy cells dividing, growing, and doing work if they're not healthy. Which is why I consider peptides and growth factors to be secondary active ingredients to the nutrients which are really working on the health of the cell and making the cell healthier. That being said, if the cell is healthy and you do have some wounding, growth factors can have a positive impact. There's a few peptides that might help and might function as active, but for the most part, with the exception of a couple, they're not gonna be that effective. There are some peptides that will have superficial activity. I'm thinking of neurotoxic peptides, the botox-like peptides that can tighten the skin. But I'm not sure I would consider those to be activity because their effect is more like a suppressant effect than a stimulating effect.

0:16:33.5 BF: Lot of complication here. Bottom line, use nutrients not just topically by the way, internal nutrition is always going to be important, but from a topical perspective, your most important active ingredients are going to be nutrients, nutrition, nutrition, nutrition. Which should come as no surprise because from an internal perspective, what's the most important active ingredients you can give your heart or your liver or your lungs or your spleen or your intestine or any other organ in the body? Nutrients. It's always going to be. That's why we eat. I mean, we should eat well. We don't always eat well, but eating well and supplementing is how you take care of your internal organs. It should be the same thing for the skin. The activity that these nutrients provide inside the body will also be provided on the skin as long as you have mechanisms in place for getting to the living cells in the bottom of the skin.

0:17:18.8 MS: That concludes our show for today and we thank you for listening. But if you just can't get enough of Ben Fuchs, the ASCP's rogue pharmacist, you can find him at truthtreatments.com. For more information on this episode or for ways to connect with Ben Fuchs or to learn more about ASCP, check out the show notes.