By Hannah Sivak, PhD
Skin Actives Scientific LLC

Do we have to follow each new craze that comes about in skin care? Sometimes we do, when the craze is related to an ingredient that is actually new in the industry and the promises are likely to hold. One such ingredient is the coffee cherry pulp, usually discarded when the coffee fruit is harvested for its seeds. It makes sense to use a potentially nice ingredient rather than throw it away. This does not mean that the fruit of the coffee will produce miracle rejuvenation, it will not. There are no unique chemicals that only the coffee fruit contains, so no miracles there. But the coffee cherry (as the coffee growers call it, the coffee fruit it is NOT a berry) contains some nice antioxidants. What's in the coffee cherry? Caffeic acid, chlorogenic acid, trigonelline, ferulic acid, quinic acid and more.

Is CoffeeBerry the best antioxidant in the universe and beyond?

There is no such thing, and whoever says that there is, is lying (or an ignorant). Many chemicals, both natural and synthetic, have antioxidant activity. Many plant extracts contain a mix of chemicals that will give you good antioxidant protection.

There are many methods to measure antioxidant activity, and depending on which method is used, you will get different numbers and different “rankings” for individual chemicals and for combinations of chemicals like plant extracts.

How about ORAC (Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity), a method now widely used to measure antioxidant activity in food and food supplements? It is a good and inexpensive laboratory assay, and it is nice that is used widely to standardize antioxidant activity. The assay measures the oxidative degradation of fluorescein after being mixed with peroxyl radical (yes, the same peroxyl radical in benzoyl peroxide, used by millions of people to help with acne!). The oxidation of fluorescein, shown by the decay of its fluorescence is slower when antioxidants are present. The sample being tested is compared to the standard antioxidant (a vitamin E analogue called trolox). Fluorescence is measured every minute for 35 minutes after the addition of the oxidant, and with that data a graph of the decay curve (fluorescence vs. time) is drawn. The area under the curve is calculated and expressed as "trolox equivalents" (TE, a vitamin E derivative) or TE. This number represents the number of micromoles of Trolox equivalents per gram of the chemical tested.

One benefit of using the ORAC method to test a substance antioxidant capacity is that it takes into account the total antioxidant capacity, even if the chemical, in the conditions of the assay, takes some time to display that capacity. This feature is especially advantageous when measuring foods and supplements that contain several ingredients, some slow and some fast, and/or ingredients than interact with each other affecting the final value.

What are the problems of using ORAC? That numbers can be used and abused for marketing purposes. For example, it is common for marketing people to compare “pears and oranges”. Blueberries are mostly water and if you use fresh blueberries to measure ORAC, they will have a lower value per gram than a blueberry powder extract, so it would not be fair to compare them. Similarly, it would not be fair to compare fresh blueberries with CoffeeBerry, a powder extract. You could, however, make a fairer comparison by expressing the results by gram of dry weight.

The antioxidant capacity of any plant material will depend on how the plant was grown, (temperature, water and nutrient supply, sunlight, etc.) and how the extract was prepared, so if you want to make an extract look good you will choose the "best" one.

Take home message

My advice is: get an assortment of antioxidants, both hydrophilic and lipophylic, and distrust numbers when used by marketing people. CoffeeBerry is a nice mix but that is not enough to make it a miracle cure. So we added a lot of other antioxidants: astaxanthin, green tea EGCG, ascorbyl palmitate, Coenzyme Q10, ellagic acid, grape seed proanthocyanidins, resveratrol, tetrahydrocurcuminoids, lycopene, coffee seed extract, coffee essential oil, glutathione, superoxide dismutase and more. The antioxidants in our coffee cream are a varied mix, some of them hydrophilic and others lipophilic. They will not make our cream a miracle cure but a great antioxidant cream. Plus, it smells nice!