If you have ever seen the movie ‘Inner Space’, the 1987 classic starring Dennis Quaid and Martin Short about a guy who volunteers for a secret experiment which would shrink him down to microscopic size and injected into a rabbit then you may get a better appreciation for the science of nanotechnology and how it can benefit skin care.
This has nothing to do with rabbits or animal testing (g-god no!)... as the movie turns out the experiment goes hilariously cray-cray and instead of the rabbit, Dennis Quaid gets miniaturised and injected into Martin Short! Anyway, it’s one of my all-time favorite movies and although comedic, it gives the viewer a pretty good indication of just how complex and intricate the human body is.
In real view, your skin looks pretty straight forward, right? I mean you look at it and you can see it has colour and texture and hair. If you look really close you may also be able to make out the pores, maybe some underlying capillaries, some dead skin flakes or some surface oil. But unless you look under a powerful microscope, you would never know the real magnitude of the skin’s structure… a whole universe unto itself with thousands of complex processes and functions carried out at a molecular level, all working in sync with the rest of your body to do just one thing… keep the surface healthy and strong.
It’s the biggest organ of the human body and the first line of defence… I think that we forget just how important skin is because we seem to do a bunch of crazy stuff to it. We bake it in the sun, we permanently mark it with pictures, we pierce it… you wouldn’t dare do something like that to your heart or your liver or your lungs. And for all the crazy stuff we do to our skin, for the most part, it does it’s job extremely well. It protects your insides from all that crazy stuff going on, on the outside... at all cost.
That ‘cost’ might be, sun damage and pigmentation. Or it could be acne or premature ageing or a sensitive reaction … These are all results of our skin’s processes trying to do their job in a hostile environment.
So why do so many of us take our skin for granted? Even nowadays, with so much good technology in the realm of skin care, many of us still have a ‘she’ll be right’ mentality. Well, no… actually she won’t.
I’m sorry to burst your bubble bae but that singular anti-ageing moisturiser you picked off-the-shelf at the supermarket, will not have the same effect as the professionally custom created skin care ‘routine’ prescribed by your experienced skin therapist… u uh…guuurl.. no way! Plus, off-the-shelf skin care products are made with ‘safety to the masses’ in mind; meaning that although you may see some new and exciting ingredient that you heard it does wonders for smoothing the skin or fading pigmentation; most often than not, that ingredient will be included in very small percentages, so it can be used by anyone who happens to fancy the packaging or be influenced by whichever A-Lister got paid to convince them that they also shop for skincare at Aldi. Pl-eeease!
So what is Nanotechnology?
Nanotechnology is science, engineering and technology conducted at the nanoscale; a dimension between approximately 1 and 100 nanometers. To put that into perspective for you, a human hair (one strand) is approximately 80,000 nanometers. So the biggest nanoparticle is still 800 times smaller than the thickness of a human hair.
Leading skin care companies like Australian Skin Institute use nanotechnology to encapsulate water-soluble actives that are usually hard to penetrate into the skin (vitamin c, vitamin b and retinol are good examples) and drive them deep into the skin where they are needed most.
Think of it like a Malteeser… those little chocolate covered balls with the yummy crunchy center. That crunchy center is what makes Malteesers special but if you just had a bag of Malteesers centers without the chocolate coating they probably wouldn’t be so fun to eat. They would probably be a little sticky or crumble and disintegrate at the bottom of the bag. It’s that beautiful, smooth chocolate outer shell (also super yummy itself) that holds that crunchy center in place and makes those little buggers so easy to pop into your mouth. WAY too easy!
Why EFA’s are important:
The skin is water resistant. If you apply ‘water-soluble’ ingredients to the surface they will not penetrate into the deeper layers of the skin… instead, sitting at the surface on a layer of dead skin.
ASI’s encapsulated nanotechnology makes it possible for high doses of ‘active’ ingredients to travel deep into the skin by wrapping these powerful ingredients in a sheath of Avocado and Macadamia Oil; healthy EFA’s (essential fatty acids) that your skin recognises and happily rolls out the welcome mat for.
Chelsea Wonka, ASI’s chief product developer and skincare expert says that our skin needs healthy amounts of EFAs to properly function. “Without them, the skin can not self regulate”, she explained. “97% of the Australian population suffer from skin dehydration, most often a result of a lack of these essential fatty acids in the skin and nothing to do with whether you drink 2 litters of water a day or not”.
Chelsea also went on to explain that essential fatty acids not only make up the skin’s natural defence barrier (The Acid Mantle, which maintains hydration levels and is also anti-microbial and anti-inflammatory) but also act as the skin’s natural ‘filtration system’, allowing essential nutrients to gently flow through the intercellular spaces throughout the various layers of the skin.
In a nutshell (haha… pun intended)... the macadamia and avocado oil that ‘encapsulates’ ASI’s active ingredients, not only allow for 10x more effective absorption by paving the way and effectively delivering them to the parts of the skin where they are needed most, but they also help to restore and strengthen your skin’s protective layer by boosting its natural EFA’s levels at the surface.