‘Evidence based’ in the skincare industry mostly means a company paid a consultancy to do ‘scientific testing.’ Very little shows any signs of actual large effect sizes other than blocking UV damage, afaik. Moisturizer does seem to help, especially in low humidity climes. Which moisturizer your skin responds best to seems to be trial and error, ie the detectable/subjective metrics are all we really have. Retinoids are one exception, but come with tradeoffs that I don’t fully understand.
I settled on snail mucin as a more natural alternative, but a significant fraction of people have mild allergic reactions to it apparently.
Snail mucin is one of those products that has less evidence behind it, besides its efficacy as a humectant, compared to the claims you’ll often see in marketing. Here’s a 1-minute video about it.
It’s true that just because a research paper was published, it doesn’t mean that the results are that reliable — if you dig into the studies that are cited in ads, you’ll often find out they had a very small number of participants, or they only did in vitro testing, or they graded their product based on the participants’ feelings, or something like that.
I’d also argue that natural doesn’t necessarily mean better. My favourite example is shea butter — some people have this romantic notion that it needs to come directly from a far-off village, freshly pounded, but the reality is that raw shea butter often contains stray particles that can in fact exacerbate allergic reactions. Refined shea butter is also really cool from a chemistry perspective, like, you can do very neat things with the texture.
‘Evidence based’ in the skincare industry mostly means a company paid a consultancy to do ‘scientific testing.’ Very little shows any signs of actual large effect sizes other than blocking UV damage, afaik. Moisturizer does seem to help, especially in low humidity climes. Which moisturizer your skin responds best to seems to be trial and error, ie the detectable/subjective metrics are all we really have. Retinoids are one exception, but come with tradeoffs that I don’t fully understand.
I settled on snail mucin as a more natural alternative, but a significant fraction of people have mild allergic reactions to it apparently.
Snail mucin is one of those products that has less evidence behind it, besides its efficacy as a humectant, compared to the claims you’ll often see in marketing. Here’s a 1-minute video about it.
It’s true that just because a research paper was published, it doesn’t mean that the results are that reliable — if you dig into the studies that are cited in ads, you’ll often find out they had a very small number of participants, or they only did in vitro testing, or they graded their product based on the participants’ feelings, or something like that.
I’d also argue that natural doesn’t necessarily mean better. My favourite example is shea butter — some people have this romantic notion that it needs to come directly from a far-off village, freshly pounded, but the reality is that raw shea butter often contains stray particles that can in fact exacerbate allergic reactions. Refined shea butter is also really cool from a chemistry perspective, like, you can do very neat things with the texture.