What will the future “new era of scientific skin care” look like?

When it comes to skin care, in the past we only knew that skin problems require care and that certain skin care products are effective for the skin. However, what exactly is the problem with the skin? What specific skin problems does the skin care product target? Which specific ingredients are working? What are the mechanisms and principles? These questions are limited by cognition and scientific development, making it difficult for us to clarify, and therefore the skin care effect is discounted.

However, with the rapid progress in biology, medicine and other disciplines in recent years, we have been able to conduct in-depth research on the physiology, biochemistry and biological mechanisms of the skin, so as to more accurately locate problems and find precise treatment strategies.

01Why do we need to take care of our skin?

You may have discovered that teenagers rarely take care of their skin, but as they grow older, they start to take care of their skin. The reason is that we find that our skin is no longer as plump, firm and elastic as when we were young, and it even begins to sag and wrinkle. Therefore, we will think of many strategies to change this situation. In the past, we could only look for various methods blindly, but whether they will work depends on luck.

But with the help of modern technology, things are different. We can conduct in-depth exploration of the skin and keep getting to the bottom of the truth behind skin changes, which will naturally allow us to care for our skin more accurately and specifically.

It can be said that one of the greatest advances that modern technology has brought us is that it has enabled us to go from chaos to precision, allowing us to deal with skin care issues more accurately and scientifically.

Next, we will follow the scientific approach and continue to explore the essence of the skin from the outside to the inside, from the general to the detailed.

02Is the skin a single structure?

Since skin care happens on the skin, is the skin a single structure? The answer is no. When we explore the structure of the skin, we can find that the skin is not a simple structure. It is divided into the epidermis, dermis and subcutaneous tissue.

The epidermis is the outermost layer, which mainly provides protection such as waterproofing and antibacterial functions. The dermis is the thickest layer, which contains a large amount of collagen fibers and elastic fibers, and supports our skin. The subcutaneous tissue is responsible for the nutrition supply of the skin.

It can be seen that the skin problems we usually talk about are mainly concentrated in the dermis. Due to the loss of this layer of support system, the skin begins to slowly collapse and presents problems such as decreased skin elasticity and the appearance of wrinkles.

Now that we understand the structure of the skin, the next question comes. Let’s continue.

03 What are the components responsible for supporting the bomb?

The answer is that it is mainly collagen, but also includes hyaluronic acid and other ingredients. Collagen is the main protein component in human skin. It is an elastic structure formed by a series of protein molecules tightly bound together. These elastic structures can both support the structure of the skin and provide a considerable buffer space for our skin. When there is more collagen, our skin is full, firm and elastic, but when collagen is gradually lost with age, the elasticity is reduced, the skin is no longer firm and wrinkles appear.

At this point, we have generally understood the essence of skin care, which is to increase collagen to make the skin plump and firm again.

So the question is, is collagen a single component or are there multiple types?

04 What is the composition of collagen?

Many times we think that collagen is a single component, but this is not the case. As one of the most abundant proteins in the human body, collagen accounts for 25-35% of the total protein in the human body. It is distributed in various tissues of the human body, such as skin, bones, tendons, ligaments and blood vessels. These tissues have different structures and functions, so collagen has naturally differentiated into many types, including at least four common types of collagen.

Type I collagen is the collagen we are most familiar with . More than 85% of the collagen in our body is of this type. Its fibers are thick and strong, with good elasticity and tensile strength. Therefore, those parts with high elasticity and tension requirements are mainly composed of type I collagen, such as skin, tendons, ligaments and bones.

Type II collagen is a highly specific protein that often serves as a structural support and is therefore primarily found in cartilage, especially in joints.

Type III collagen can form finer fibril networks and is therefore found in loose connective tissues such as the skin, blood vessels, and internal organs.

Type IV adhesive exists as a component of the basement membrane .

It can be seen that for skin care, what we need to pay most attention to is type I collagen, which is the component that is truly widely present in the skin and plays a role in supporting and elasticizing the skin.

05 How to supplement collagen?

So, at this point, we can supplement the skin in a targeted manner. However, how to supplement collagen, especially type I collagen, has actually gone through a lot of exploration and development.

Let's think about it together. When you want to supplement collagen, what should you do? I guess many people's first thought is to supplement it directly.

This was indeed a common practice in the early days. Many skin care products contain rich collagen. However, can the skin absorb collagen macromolecules? How much can it absorb? These are all problems that need to be faced. Of course, there were various strategies for filling collagen later, but they all face a problem: collagen degrades after entering the body, so collagen needs to be continuously replenished. Once it stops, it will return to its previous state.

Of course, there are also some new ideas that are to supplement through other means, such as dietary intake of collagen to indirectly supplement skin collagen, but its effectiveness still needs further verification.

Therefore, it is very difficult to restore collagen by relying on exogenous supplementation. So can we activate collagen self-production more directly? After all, skin cells themselves can synthesize collagen, but with the increase of age, the speed of collagen synthesis is not as fast as the degradation speed, which leads to the appearance of skin problems.

This is also the core of the new generation of ingredient skin care science: directly stimulating the body's ability to produce collagen . Of course, the principle seems simple, but it is very difficult to actually achieve it, because the factor behind it is that the collagen mother cells that produce collagen also change over time, so it is necessary to further solve the problem of collagen mother cells.

In this regard, different skin care sciences have different strategies and plans.

It can be said that technological skin care is the future, and precise response based on ingredients is a scientific way to improve skin. Similar skin care strategies are already the new ideas of major skin care technology brands today, which is to truly activate cell regeneration to promote endogenous collagen proliferation, so that the skin can truly become more elastic and firm. Of course, this is not only for skin elasticity, but also for other skin problems. Scientifically analyzing the skin, constantly and accurately locating skin problems, and then using more professional and precise ingredients to repair the skin, this is the future of skin care technology.

1 Ma, Yingxuan, and Kim Johnson. "Arabinogalactan proteins–multifunctional glycoproteins of the plant cell wall." The Cell Surface 9 (2023): 100102.