Skin Actives – General
July 3rd, 2022 by Dr. Hannah Sivak
Why are Skin Actives ingredient lists so long? It’s not because of “label value”, the skincare industry practice that uses plant Latin names to hide the “baddies” and make you think you are getting value for money. Not at all. Each ingredient in our list has a good reason to be there. We at Skin Actives understand how complex the skin is. To address a skin problem, or to improve skin health, or reverse skin aging, we need to address that complexity, and this is how our ingredient lists become so long. Look, for example, at how eczema develops (for a more detailed explanation, please see this post). You have…
May 18th, 2022 by Dr. Hannah Sivak
I am worried about all that talk about “plant-based” you see in skincare advertising. Why? Because it seems that in pursuit of anything and everything “plant”, we are going in the wrong direction. Example: alkanes. I love alkanes: linear carbon and hydrogen chains, make up waxes that will protect leaves and fruits from losing water. They also work great at preventing water loss from our skin, and the most expensive skincare products use inexpensive petrolatum and mineral oil to make a cream that will prevent water loss and accelerate healing. Most of the petrolatum and mineral oil we use comes from ancient organic matter, the same source of the gas/petrol…
May 16th, 2022 by Dr. Hannah Sivak
This sounds big, but that’s because we are! Synergy is an interaction or cooperation giving rise to a whole that is greater than the simple sum of its parts. Our products contain amino acids and other nutrients that will be better used by your skin because there are growth factors and antioxidants. Your hair will be stronger because apocynin will support your stem cells while ROS* BioNet prevents damage to the cell membranes. Skin Actives has never been about the one “magic ingredient” because we understand how a living system works. We see the skin as it interacts with the rest of the body and we look at the epidermis…
April 22nd, 2022 by Dr. Hannah Sivak
Decrease in testosterone levels in males?Increase in breast cancer in women?Bad hair or loss of hair? Stop and think. Where is the information coming from? From a company trying to sell you something without ‘X’ or “Z”? From a “non-profit” that sells “certificates of safety”? From a television personality who wants to increase his visibility? Follow the money. If a problem exists, we need to find out what’s causing it, not start blaming everything invented since 1950. And what about remedies? Will red light increase testosterone? We are not plants (they have receptors for red light). Where on earth did they get the evidence that proves that red light increases…
April 16th, 2022 by Dr. Hannah Sivak
Those “miracle” natural substances that people have been using for centuries or even millennia are useful because of the chemicals they contain. Sometimes, the stories are not true and there is nothing beneficial in those false miracle products. But when they effectively treat a human (or animal) condition, biochemists and phytochemists will work hard to identify the chemicals that confer the natural substance its power. The process is hard and time-consuming, but eventually, we find the key chemical. Sometimes, there is more than just one active chemical, like it’s the case of tea leaves (EGCG, caffeine). It gets even more interesting when the biochemist finds the mechanism of action. Finding…
February 1st, 2021 by Dr. Hannah Sivak
When you make a coffee extract at home (be an espresso or drip) the extract you get is brown. If you make a tea leaf extract, it will be light brown. When you also make fruit extracts, (called smoothies or fruit juices), their colors are similar to the fruits you are using to make the extract. So how come that when you buy a cream with coffee extract it is as white as snow? These are the possibilities: The fruit (or root) it was extracted from is white like snow The extract was further purified until all colored substances were eliminated (this is OK as long as the active components…
January 18th, 2020 by Dr. Hannah Sivak
We get attracted to plant extracts for many reasons. Besides advertising, there are cultural influences (what did your grandmother use when you were sick?), the attraction of the exotic (if it is Korean, it must be better), and even the common name of the plant (dragon’s blood, anybody?). As a scientist, I have to be more careful with how I choose plant extracts as an ingredient for our Skin Actives products. Yes, I look at plants that were used for centuries by different peoples. I read the publications that deal with the ethnological use of the plant extracts, but that is only the beginning. Maybe the ancient people who used…
January 1st, 2020 by Dr. Hannah Sivak
Answer: We understand the seriousness of the problem and we face it differently. The key concept is that the skin is alive and quite capable of doing its job, until it isn’t. What has changed? The skin ages, or is damaged, or the environment changes and overwhelms the defenses. Our answer: we replenish the skin’s natural defenses, by carefully following the established antioxidant system already at work in our skin. We don’t innovate in the sense that we don’t build from scratch, we only refresh, “top-up” the natural order. We can achieve this because we understand how the skin functions: its anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, and molecular biology. Amazing scientific advances…
January 1st, 2020 by Dr. Hannah Sivak
The pressure on us, women, has been there forever (think of what women have been doing, and still are, to their feet). The pressure on women to have a mask-like skin has been here for centuries. We may think that it is us who make the decision, but do we? The answer to this question is within ourselves, we call it “common sense”. Dos your skin look like “glass”? No. So don’t push it to make it so. Think of your skin as a live organ that protects you from a hostile environment (UV, reactive oxygen species, pollutants) and keep treating it nicely so that it can keep doing…
December 26th, 2019 by Dr. Hannah Sivak
These will not help you 1) Price. There is no correlation between price and quality because prices are greatly inflated to give the illusion of a luxury good or because the company’s structure requires huge mark-ups 2) Texture and smell. You may want these characteristics but these alone will say nothing about how effective the product will be 3) Use of “science” in advertising. Skin care companies have became very good at using scientific sounding language to give an impression of seriousness. 4) Where is it made? Korean, Japanese, French companies use the same ingredients to manufacture skin care products. Skin care is a global market. At most, there may…
December 24th, 2019 by Dr. Hannah Sivak
I wish I could write “proper” cards to everyone of you. Every time a see a good review or I recognize a name on the forum that I have seen for years, it makes me happy. Proud and happy. I am so proud and happy that we have been able to keep our small family company for so long, never “selling out our soul”. We continue to study, read, research, innovate and work hard every day, not just for you but also for us because it makes us happy to contribute to the health and well being of all our customers/members/friends/clients. Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukah, Greetings of the Season, Happy…
December 22nd, 2019 by Dr. Hannah Sivak
Nobody likes to talk about money (“it is so crass!”) but the question arises once and again. What are the relative contributions to the price of a skin care product? There can be a huge difference in the price of ingredients, even when the INCI name is the same or very similar. For example, a tea extract can be just what you make when you have a cup of tea, a tea bag left in very hot water for a few minutes. But this term can also refer to an extract that has been repeatedly purified to enrich it in epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG), a polyphenol responsible for many of the…
December 21st, 2019 by Dr. Hannah Sivak
One thing I know is that people are silly when it comes to assess their bodies. This often works against us, like with young people being misled about being fat. It is called body dismorphic disorder and it can become a major problem lead to death like with Karen Carpenter, the great singer. It also happens with our faces. We may think that everybody is looking at that big zit when actually it is so minor that only us notice them. The same happens with wrinkles. So, what “deserves” plastic surgery? We need to be careful here, because the “after” may be worse than the “before”. Look on the internet…
December 21st, 2019 by Dr. Hannah Sivak
Skin Actives, our company. When we started Skin Actives, we had the advantage of being outsiders, so everything we did was “thinking outside the box”. For us, there was no box. Our starting point was not an existing cream, but beneficial activity on the skin. The “medium” was there just to provide a carrier that would allow the active/s to exert their activity on the skin, providing, for example, a stabilizing medium for the active protein. If we wanted to use vitamin C, my question was not what was popular or sold well but, rather, which chemical derivative would keep it vitamin C activity longer and without side effects. At…
July 6th, 2019 by Dr. Hannah Sivak
The first thing you need to know: boxes for skin care products cost a lot of money. They are made to order and the minimum is usually in the (many) thousands. Once you print a box with the ingredient list, forget about improving the formula, because you would have to discard so many boxes and throw away good money. This is why we at Skin Actives don’t usually use boxes. Typically, we change ingredient lists as needed, usually to add one or two actives that new scientific research shows to be effective for the problem we are addressing with the product. The same is true for special packaging. From the…
June 14th, 2019 by Dr. Hannah Sivak
How much is too much? The answer to this apparently simple question is very complicated: as complicated as the number of ingredients used in skin care. Also, for a good answer, you may have to go to numbers that are much smaller than a percent (1%) and go to parts per million. In the best of cases more is likely to be a waste of money. You are throwing away the money you spent on the active by trying to add more. For example, if you add more ascorbic acid to a serum than will possibly dissolve (as determined by the laws of nature and how water interacts with ascorbic…
April 28th, 2019 by Dr. Hannah Sivak
In short: A sea kelp bioferment-based serum that includes Skin Actives ROS BIONETTM plus the best low molecular weight antioxidants. Ingredients: Water, Sea Kelp (Lactobacillus/Kelp Ferment Filtrate) Bioferment, Sodium PCA, Magnesium Ascorbyl Phosphate (Vitamin C), Sodium Hyaluronate (Hyaluronic Acid), Ferulic Acid, Aloe Barbadensis (Aloe Vera) Leaf Extract, Camellia Sinensis (Green Tea) Epigallocatechin Gallate, Niacinamide, Carnosine, Hesperidin Methyl Chalcone, Carnitine, Tetrahydrodiferuloylmethane (and) Tetrahydrodemethoxydiferuloylmethane (and) Tetrahydrobisdemethoxydiferuloylmethane, Sorghum Bicolor Leaf/Stem Extract, Lycopene, Astaxanthin, Fucoxanthin, Porphyridium Polysaccharide, Glutathione, sh-Polypeptide-2, sh-Polypeptide-77 (Glutaredoxin (GRX)), Superoxide Dismutase, Citric Acid, Propylene Glycol (and) Diazolidinyl Urea (and) Methylparaben (and) Propylparaben. Actives by property Anti-inflammatory: sea kelp bioferment, Porphyridium polysaccharide, Low molecular weight antioxidants: green tea EGCG, hyaluronic acid, hesperidin…
April 24th, 2019 by Dr. Hannah Sivak
Living in the city can be stressful to the skin: high concentrations of pollutants in the air will stress your skin through the production of free radicals. Free radicals are high energy molecules that are missing an electron and will go about starting chain reactions and destroying molecules in their search for the missing electron. The molecules they stole electrons from will become ROS* themselves and continue a chain reaction. What we see in a polluted city is a “cloud” of very fine particles floating in the air, and the air smells strange. We should be concerned because those fine particles are full of strong oxidants that can increase respiratory…
April 23rd, 2019 by Dr. Hannah Sivak
First, what is a line corrector? It is an emergency/makeup trick to “hide” wrinkles when you are getting ready for a party. It is not a long term anti-aging treatment. What can you do? You have options. “Fill” them. A thick serum that contains some reflecting powder may help. This is the strategy of some products now on the market. This may have a (slightly) artificial look and be visible depending on the type of lighting. Smooth them. Our anti-aging Hydramist contains the mineral strontium and will smooth your fine lines temporarily. Another useful property: it may prevent a rosacea flare when you enter a warm room. The best of…
April 23rd, 2019 by Dr. Hannah Sivak
Once upon a time I was in love with algae (I almost named my daughter after a Diatom, class Bacillariophyceae). Then I fell in love with polysaccharides. In fact, I am still in love with both. So what could be more perfect that to work with algae polysaccharides? Nothing, but, in top of the beauty of algae and the complexity of polysaccharides, there are all the health benefits that these special polysaccharides have for us, humans. What so special about algae? It depends. All the plants we are familiar with, like the palms in my back garden or the roses in the front, evolved from green algae. The basic cell…