By Hannah Sivak, PhD
Skin Actives Scientific LLC

The Consumer Report list
We trust the Consumer Report because they are independent of outside pressure: they do not sell the first place in the list. I do base my choice of car on the Consumer Report testing. But I am not that sure you should base your choice of anti-wrinkle cream on the report published in the January issue. Why?

The methodology
I have nothing against the method. If you are trying to choose the best anti-wrinkle cream, a method based on the visual detection of wrinkles is perfectly suitable.

The candidates
This is the study's "defect". There were only ten products tested, so the best will have to be the best of the pack (and would not include, obviously, Skin Actives Scientific products!). So the "best antiwrinkle cream" is, in fact, "the best anti-wrinkle cream out of the ten products we chose to test". I can see the problem: a test, to be reliable, has to include a certain number of people, and you can't test 100 products without spending a huge number of money.

The winner
The best product out of the ten tested was Olay Regenerist. From the picture published in the magazine you can tell that it helped. I am not surprised, because Olay Regenerist contains some good actives: niacinamide, palmitoyl pentapeptide (also included in StriVectin, which did badly) and allantoin. All of these actives are sold by Skin Actives Scientific.

What else can you learn from the study?
There is no correlation between price and quality. La Prairie Cellular, at $335, did worse than Olay ($57).

Why did La Prairie do so badly?
Here is a good part of the ingredient lists for La Prairie Cellular: Water, Cyclopentasiloxane, Dimethicone,SD Alcohol 40-B (alcohol denatured with butyl alcohol), Methylpropanediol, Diprophene Glycol, Isododecane, Butylene Glycol, cetyl Dimethicone Copolyol, Ethylhexyl Palmitate, PEG/PPG-20/15, Dimethicone, Glycoproteins, PanaxGinseng Root Extract,  Equisetum Arvense (Horsetail) Extract, Ascorbyl Glucoside, Ascophyllum Nodosum (Algae) Extract, Quartz (silica), Dioscorea Villosa (Wild Yam) Root Extract, Oleyl Alcohol, Glycine Soja (Soybean) Sterols, Cholesteryl Nonanoate, Cholesteryl Oleate, Propylene Carbonate,Colesteryl Stereate, Glucosamine HCL, Acetyl Glutamyl Hexapeptide-3, Hyaluronic Acid, Bambusa Vulgaris (Bamboo) Leaf/Stem Extract, Piusum Sativum (Pea) Extract, Caprylyl Glycol, Arginine, Silica, Dimethyl Silyate, Phyllantus Emblica Fruit Extract, Bellis Perennis (Daisy) flower Extract, Euterpe Oleracea Fruit Extract, more.

The base is a silicone mix that will give a silky feel but will supply nothing to the skin. The "actives" (in bold) are nothing special, a bad and very inexpensive selection out of the hundreds they could have put into this product. There is so me good stuff there, like soy sterols and hyaluronic acid, but so low in the list of ingredients (indicates low concentration) that they are unlikely to do anything much. In short, the people of La Prairie are putting their money into promotion and fake French names, rather than in good actives. A waste of an opportunity to benefit your skin besides their pockets.

My suggestion
Get more anti-wrinkle power for less money: Skin Actives Scientific offers you the actives that did work, and much more. Olay cannot afford to give you many other actives that also help with wrinkles because they need to keep their prices low. They cannot afford to give you epidermal growth factor and Coenzyme Q10, and they left out many actives that will result in sustained improvement of the skin, like hyaluronic acid and collagen peptides.

Your best bet
Try Olay Regenerist if you like, but make sure you give a chance to Skin Actives Scientific anti-age cream with resveratrol.

News (12/17/07)

We have changed our anti-age cream! Now with pure resveratrol (hard to get, and expensive but we got it!) our cream contains four times as much resveratrol and the color is a creamy cream, much nicer than before.