By Hannah Sivak, PhD
Biochemist, Skin Actives Scientific LLC

..or "How easy is it to get women into a frenzy"

Somebody said on the BBC that this new product from Boots actually works. Women are so used to being cheated and sold stuff that does not work, that anybody who had a Boots shop within 100 miles went and bought this product until every Boots was sold out.

What bothers me is NOT that women got into a frenzy (I get into frenzies fairly often) but that women spend billions of dollars in skin care products knowing that most of them will be a disappointment, irrespective of the price tag.

In the last couple of months, Consumer Reports in the USA and the BBC in the UK have reminded women that there is such a thing as a product that works, and that price has no relation to activity.

Why does the Boots product work? Because it actually contains actives: vitamin C (as sodium ascorbyl phosphate), retinoid (as retinyl palmitate), nutrition (as an extract of white lupines), signal peptides (as palmitoyl oligopeptide and palmitoyl tetrapeptide-3).  Also present, in minute concentrations unlikely to do much, are ginseng and mulberry leaf extract.

If you want to make your own, improved No7, add Magnesium Ascorbyl Phosphate, Retinyl Acetate, and palmitoyl pentapeptide to Canvas base cream. Complete by adding three or four drops of SAS Antiox-Booster. Why is this an improved version? Because you can use the optimal concentrations for each active, and the antiOx booster will give you a more complete  mix of antioxidants.