Debunking the "All Natural" Skincare Fad

If you are a product junkie, in the skincare industry, or just a concerned consumer, we are sure that you have heard about and have read up on the product trend that focuses on “all natural” ingredients as an effective way to tackle your anti-aging and preventative skin care needs. Naturally (no pun intended), this trend totally makes sense; the cosmetics industry is relatively unregulated, and some of the ingredients that we have seen in some of the most common household beauty brands are enough to make anyone nervous enough to stick with just coconut oil and rose water for life.

However, at Intoxicated Cosmetics, we believe that balance is everything. After years of research, we have come to find is that many of these “all natural” products, first of all are not actually all natural, and second of all just simply do not work. In order for any cosmetics company to come out with a serum, cream, or even makeup, they first of all have to extract and process their natural ingredients in a biochemistry lab, (meaning that the ingredients have synthetic components to them from the beginning), and second of all have to add preservatives to obtain longer shelf life.

To dive a little bit deeper, the word "natural" means literally nothing as far as the FDA is concerned. Though there has been some legislative movement toward creating more regulations regarding the ingredients cosmetic brands are using, there is currently not a solid rule that can stop any brand from slapping the word “natural” on their labels, as long as the claim is not “misleading” - Not to mention that truly organic ingredients can be incredibly volatile and have short shelf lives – usually up to only 3 months. Many times, a brand needs to create synthetic ingredients in order to ensure their product will work well every single time. Just because something's made in a lab, doesn't mean it's toxic — and just because something's completely natural, doesn't mean it's not.

In addition to not actually being truly natural or organic, many of these products do little to nothing to actually help achieve anti-aging results. If you have something, say rose hip water, and you just put that on the skin, that's not going to penetrate your skin because of the molecular makeup. However, rose hip is a great antioxidant and anti-inflammatory. So why not take that and encapsulate it by wrapping a little bit of an oil molecule around it, and then apply it to the skin? Again, as you can see, that’s a perfect example of a natural ingredient simply enhanced by science.

To give you an example of this found in Intoxicated’s skincare range, look no further than our Bee Serum, where we use Royal Epigen P5, a new and biologically active peptide that activates skin regeneration and glow that mimics Royal Jelly can be found.

Royal Epigen P5 is a synthetic variation of Royal Jelly inspired by epigenetic science to maximize its positive effects on skin. Honeybee workers and queens greatly differ in appearance, longevity and behavior despite the fact that they share exactly the same DNA makeup. In 2011, Japanese scientists discovered that honeybees modify their genetic code by consuming royal jelly. Indeed, a protein of this peculiar juice was shown to be able to modify gene expression in honeybees without changing the DNA sequence, a biological process called epigenetics. This protein was named royalactin (“queenmaker”) as it determined the fate of the honeybee.

Due to the fact that royalactin is unstable and too large to penetrate the skin, we developed a peptide that copies its active sequence. For improved skin uptake, the peptide was incorporated into a soft sphere carrier system based on shea butter. In clinical studies, RoyalEpigen P5 stimulated skin renewal, which led to a rapid increase in skin smoothness. In addition to this, when applied on the face of women presenting uneven skin tones, this royalactin-like peptide improved the uniformity of their complexions within just 28 days.

In vitro assays performed on skin cells showed the capacity of RoyalEpigen P5 to do the following:

• improve tissue regeneration by stimulating cell proliferation and migration
• maintain the regenerative potential of skin cells in an aging environment
• activate protein turnover through proteasome stimulation.

Meaning, although we loved what royalactin could do for skincare, it is just simply too unstable to use, and its molecules are too large to penetrate skin. So, we went ahead and perfected what nature has already given us!

Although we do specialize in synthesizing natural ingredients, don’t let some of the big words on our boxes scare you! Every single one of our ingredients are safe to use and are just basically perfected versions of the chemical compounds found in nature.