Benjamin Knife Fuchs (0:00)

Calling all forward thinking estheticians, it's time to redefine the art of skincare and embrace a revolutionary approach that begins with your clients. Skin Cell Health. I'm pharmacist Benjamin Knife Fuchs welcoming you to Truth Treatment Systems where beauty begins. At the cell, we believe you're not just a beauty professional, you are a healthcare professional. You want to make a positive difference and you want to make a good living and we will help you do both. We're here to support your out of the box thinking and empower you to question traditional products, outdated formulations and old school ingredients. Imagine a world where solutions to the skin's enigmatic conditions lie just beyond the horizon. At Truth, we're not just a skincare brand. We're a movement that encourages you to explore better solutions and find that aha moment that changes the game. You are an artist and a healer of the skin and we're here to provide the canvas and the tools for you to create tailored protocols leaving generic ones in the past. Sign up now at truthtreatmentspro.com and receive two complimentary mineral rich electrolyte sheet masks. That's truthtreatmentspro.com where healthy skin is beautiful skin.

Maggie Stasik (1:12)

Hello and welcome to ASCP and the Rogue Pharmacist with Benjamin Knight Fuchs. In each episode, we'll explore how internal and external factors can impact the skin. I'm Maggie Stasik, ASCP's program director and joining me is Ben Fuchs, skincare formulator and pharmacist. Hey, Ben.

Benjamin Knife Fuchs (1:28)

Hello, Maggie. Good to see you.

Maggie Stasik (1:30)

Good to see you. Active ingredients play a key role in skincare, but they can be tricky to navigate. Ben, can you help us understand what active really means?

Benjamin Knife Fuchs (1:40)

What active really means? Great question. Active means something's happening, but within that umbrella definition, making things happen, there's different sub definitions. So it just kind of depends on what you want to happen. Two broad categories of sub definitions could be making things happen or stopping things from happening. So under the umbrella term of activity, you have active ingredients or activity that makes things happen or activity that shuts things down. Typically, shutting things down is a lot easier than making things happen. In fact, if you make things happen in the skin for the most part, I'll tell you some exceptions here. If you truly make things happen on the skin, you're in the realm of drug. And this is why skincare companies will play with this gray area of implying that things are happening without actually stating that things are happening. And I'm gonna subdivide this make things happen here in a moment. But suppressing things or inhibiting things or stopping things, that's a little easier to do. And there's a lot of ingredients that will do that. And there's also a lot of ingredients that will protect the skin. Now, do you say protection is activity? It's a judgment call. I don't personally think it's activity, and I don't even really think that suppression or inhibition is activity. I think making things happen is activity. So I'll talk about that in a moment. But in the subcategory of suppressing or protecting, you have things like aloe vera, zinc oxide, calamine, green tea extract, epigallocatech, and antioxidant type ingredients. Those calm the skin down. The reason those are not considered to be problematic is because it's much easier for an ingredient to suppress than it is to stimulate activity. To stimulate activity, you really gotta know what you're doing because the activity is happening at the level of the cell. Protection doesn't have to happen at the level of the cell. For example, you can just superficially cover the skin and then you're gonna get some protection. Or there are certain herbs that contain antioxidants, bioflavonoids and carotenes and such that will kind of calm the tissue down. Excuse me, without getting right into the cell. To get into the cell is really where true activity comes from. And that requires understanding what a cell needs. The good news is a cell doesn't need a lot of stuff. Now, before I even get into that, and I'm talking about that here in a second, we want to also make a distinction between tactile and what I call biologic response modifiers, or BRMs. BRMs are things that change biology. Tactile ingredients are perceived as being active, but they're not necessarily active. And the classic example is moisturizers. Like, you'll rub a moisturizer on your skin and you'll go, oh, I'm moisturized. That's not really activity. That's an ingredient that's like a wax and an oil that's on the surface of your skin that you're feeling. You haven't really done anything. And skincare companies understand that there are certain ingredients that have a tactile sensation that have a sensual nature to them. And they understand that the consumer will collapse in their mind that tactile sensation with activity. Classic example, as I say, is moisturizers, also eye creams. Eye creams are classic for this. You put an eye cream on and you go, Oh, I did something to my eyes. No, you just put some silicon and some slick sensation on your eyes and that's all you've done. You've created a superficial change. Ironically, in the long run, occlusion or putting things on the surface of the skin can actually suppress activity and have a negative effect. But that's another story we can talk about later. True active ingredients are ingredients that will stimulate cells to do things, make collagen, for example, divide, for example, secrete various growth factors, for example. These ingredients, these functions or activities require interacting with the cell. And there's a lot of ingredients that will interact with the cell. The most important, in my opinion, the most important ingredients that will interact with the cell are essential nutrients. Now you know I love nutrition. I'm a nutritionist even as much as I am a skincare chemist. And in fact, my truth treatments and all my formulations leverage topical nutrition. Because at the end of the day, a cell has a menu from which it eats from, if you will. It's not going to take things in that it doesn't recognize or that it doesn't need. What does it recognize and what does it need? Basically, for the most part, the combination of what it recognizes, what it needs are nutrients, Specifically essential nutrients. The word essential in nutrition means you have to have it in your diet, you have to have it from the outside, cause your body can't make it. And there are some 80 or so or 90 or so, depending on who you ask. Essential nutrients that are minerals, amino acids, fatty acids and vitamins. Those are going to be the most important ingredients for my favorite term, biochemistry, I'll tell you right now. Up regulation, making things happen. Whenever I say upregulation, people get all confused because it sounds kind of chemistry and biology and stuff, but basically means it makes, it's making things happen. Downregulation means shutting things down. Upregulation means making things happen. As a formulator and as estheticians, we're interested in up regulation at the level of the cell. The way to do that, the best way to do that, the most effective way to do that and the gentlest and non toxic, most non toxic way to do that is with the essential nutrients, but not all the essential nutrients, specifically minerals, ionic minerals, have an ability to enter into cells and enter into or pass through the stratum corneum, which is a whole nother story how you're going to get to the stratum corneum to the cell, because the stratum corneum is a barrier. And so your active ingredient it's not enough to have an ingredient that will interact with the cell. You got to figure out how to get that ingredient to the cell so it can interact with it. Ionic minerals are great. I use them in a lot of my formulations because they penetrate a, and they penetrate into cells. In fact, they penetrate into cells so effectively that they'll allow the penetration of other ingredients. They support the penetration of other nutrients. That's why they're a perfect pairing with other active ingredients. Essential fatty acids, likewise, those can penetrate through the cell and those can or penetrate through the skin, stratum, corneum and get into a cell and then amino acids a little bit, not as much. But the most important upregulating ingredients are the vitamins. And on top of that, deficiencies in vitamins are very common. Now not all vitamins are going to have a cellular effect, but two stand out in importance. And every esthetician knows, in fact these days, every consumer knows. The two most important active ingredients by far and away are the two vitamins that interact with the cell not only to get into the cell, but even into the genetics, which is pretty darn amazing. And that is real activity. And of course that's vitamin C and vitamin A. And vitamin C and vitamin A are so important for anybody who's interested in anti aging the skin and keeping the skin healthy and making corrections in unhealthy skin and of course for estheticians that in my opinion that if you're stranded on a desert island and you can only bring two ingredients for your skin, vitamin C and vitamin A. Now it's not quite that simple because there's different forms of vitamin C and there's different forms of vitamin A. There's fat soluble vitamin C and water soluble vitamin C. So you got to understand those. But by far and away the most important active ingredients are going to be vitamin C and vitamin A. Vitamin E is important for protecting the cell, but you know, is protection, activity. I'm not sure if you could consider protection to be activity. I forgot to mention niacin, vitamin B3, that's also another very important active ingredient. And while it's not as important as vitamin C and vitamin A, probably it's, it's still got a lot of functionality. And niacin is another, I would call active ingredient for the skin. Vitamin D as well. Vitamin D is important for helping cells divide appropriately, also supporting calcium, the absorption of calcium into cells. And then vitamin K has got some blood or circulatory benefits. The B complex in general, aside From Niacin vitamin B3 can have some benefits, but not a lot of benefits. I wouldn't call them active. The most important, other than niacin, the most important topical B vitamin is pantothenic acid, which is used as dexpanthenol. You'll see that sometimes. Or calcium, pantothenate. Those don't really have cellular activity per se, although they can do some. They may have some skin softening effects, which I wouldn't consider to be activity. Then there's the indirect activity ingredients that provide indirect activity. The ingredients I just mentioned, they will actually interact with the cell itself, presuming that they get to the cell, which is, you know, that's another story. But there's also ingredients that can indirectly affect the cell. In fact, this one class of ingredients that I'm thinking that indirectly affects the cell, actively affects the cell is so important that in a way, it has really created the whole profession of estheticianship. Before this ingredient became popular, there were estheticians, but it wasn't really a thing to be an esthetician. There weren't a lot of beauty schools or esthetician schools. It wasn't like there were esthetic where this one class of ingredient, this one class of ingredients, revolutionized skincare. And as a pharmacist, I had been working with this class of ingredients before everybody knew about it because I was getting prescriptions for it. But right around 1990, I don't know, you know, if you were. You probably weren't around being an esthetician back then. This ingredient came out, this class of ingredients came out and changed skincare because it was active, but it was indirectly active. And that is alpha hydroxy acids.