How we "Extract" our Venoms
A lot of our clients have been asking us how we extract the venom found in our serums, so we figured that we would give everyone a breakdown. First of all - NO ANIMALS WERE HARMED IN THE MAKING OF OUR SERUMS! Being animal lovers ourselves, we knew that we did not want to harm any of the ectothermic creatures that we based our serum range on. But, we also knew that there were so many beneficial components to their venoms, and so we found a perfect solution for all 3 of our serums.
Snake and Snail's venoms are synthetic, but don't let that word scare you. Basically we had our biochemical company take the chemical compounds found in the venoms, dissect them without the harmful components (some of the naturally occurring components have negative effects), and recreate the compounds. This is the general idea of Intoxicated's serum line - take something created by nature, but then perfecting it by science. Then we added other ingredients specific to each serum, ranging from plant-base stem cells, vitamins E & C, Hyadisine (a more hydrating and deeper penetrating form of Hyaluronic Acid), green and white tea extracts, snail mucin, and other biomimetic peptides; all depending on which serum we are talking about.
Our bee serum is the only serum that uses naturally occurring venom. And we get it, what about the bees!? Most people know that when a bee goes to sting something, they are essentially committing suicide, as their barbed tip penetrates flesh and therefore essentially pulls out the guts of the bee. Since we didn’t want to harm any bees in the creation of our serums, we came up with a way to extract their venom that doesn’t kill them.
This revolutionary way of venom extraction is done is with electrical currents. We basically use a machine with a glass plate attachment that hooks up to the entrance of hives. This machine sends an electrical current through the glass in order to get the bees attention. The pulsation is so low that only about one in 10,000 bees actually react to the plate, but when they do, they want to protect their hives. Therefore, they come out of the hive and go to sting the plate, but since the glass is impenetrable, when sting it they do not lose their stingers! They basically just leave the venom on the glass plate and then we let it dry, scrape it up, and send it to our lab to be purified.
Another example of our inspired by nature but perfected by science mindset is that we use a synthetic variation of bees Royal Jelly called Royal Epigen in our Bee Serum. The reason why we used a synthetic variation of this is because the incredibly nourishing and regenerating natural molecular makeup of Royal Jelly is too large to penetrate skin. But why let such a beautiful molecular makeup not be able to truly benefit our skin?! So, we just adjusted it. Synthetic doesn't have to necessarily mean fake, it can also mean modified. This is just one of many examples found in our serums!
If you have any questions at all on the ingredients found in our serums, please email us at rachel@intoxicatedcosmetics.com