Retinoids, Peptides and Injectables: A Dermatologist on What Works and What’s Overhyped

Skin is a barrier organ. All it takes is to see one patient who has a severe burn or something that disrupts their skin barrier to see immediately how important our skin is as a barrier. There was an early observational study in Europe that showed people just living closer to a big highway versus farther away had worse skin quality in terms of brown spots and lines and wrinkles. Just think to yourself, whenever you're not washing your face at night, it's like getting in bed with your shoes on. The last time we had a sunscreen approved in the US, do you know when it was? 1999. It's pretty shocking in the dermatology community. Our skin cancer rate in the US is one in five, which I think is a lot because if you think of how many patients I see in a day, that means several of them are going to get skin cancer. But in Australia, it is two in three. So they have a real public health challenge.

Why are we taking skincare advice from them then?

because they've gotten so serious about sun protection. I

think we've got a bit of a branding problem with SPF. I think if someone were to discover this as a product today and call it the best anti-aging skincare product of all time, then everyone would be using it every day.

I think sunscreen needs the same PR that like kale has had. Some people even get in a tanning bed to prepare for vacation. And we see more skin cancer in people who have those behaviors than people who actually get low levels of consistent sun exposure. As one of my medical school professors loved to say, you better take care of your body like you might need it for 100 years. They just added one ingredient and followed subjects for 52 weeks. They had sequential imaging at defined time points. They were evaluated by an investigator. They reported their own self-assessment. And at the end of the year, every element of skin quality, texture, clarity, pigment, improved by about 50%, which is a big improvement. We're used to seeing, you know, little percent improvements, you know, that most products of this eye cream will give you an 8% improvement. This 50%, and that ingredient was...

Noelle, welcome. I'm so glad to be here. And congratulations. Thank

you. I'm

buzzing for you. Thank

you. Our own little longevity and regeneration

project. Hey, do you know the gender?

Yes. Give you the inside scoop. We're having a boy. Have you already picked a name? We have not.

Okay. Anyway, we're here to talk about skin.

We are.

And I think to start with, it'd be really useful to give a little bit of background context because you sit at this interesting intersection between, you know, clinical practitioner, researcher, scientist. So why don't we start there?

So skin, speaking of children, in a children's book, it would say, you know, we keep the outside out and the inside in. And that is true. Skin is a barrier organ. And all it takes is to see one patient who has a severe burn or something that disrupts their skin barrier to see immediately how important our skin is as a barrier. Because someone with a severe burn can't control their water balance. They lose so much water through the skin. They get infections very readily. So when we're talking about healthy skin, one