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Most functional ingredients today actually increase photosensitivity
Do most popular skincare functional ingredients possibly increase aging? As I understand, Vitamin C, n-acetyl Glucosamine, niacinamide etcetera lighten your skin by decreasing melanin content in your skin. Melanin is the natural protection mechanism of your skin to prevent UV damage. I can’t find any research on this topic! To me it doesn’t seem recommendable to say the amount is probably negligible.
Those ingredients have been shown to have some short-term positive effects, and could be used for aesthetic reasons. But isn’t it plausible there are negative effects long term, because pigmentation is decreased? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2671032/
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5 Replies
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The market behaves in some respects like the Oracle of Delphi. There are such large numbers of consumers that products which don’t actually work, rapidly disappear from the market. Formulating products is not a matter of discussing science articles, but of going into the lab and designing and producing and testing and recording and analysing and repeating as necessary until you make something that demonstrably does what you claim it does.
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But I’m talking about ingredients now, not designing products. Vitamin C and niacinamide have been shown to work effectively for numerous topical applications (less free radical damage, more collagen). Also skin lightening is one of their desired effects. But I would like to know if this effect might actually be dangerous long-term because surely less melanin = more uv damage. Or is the amount negligible (it’s not to the naked eye though)?
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It is not my concern to be bothered about such things. Too busy with actual work.
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I don’t think less melanin has been proven and speculation suggests the latter would be minimally affected as there are seven pathways for melanin formation in skin with most important being melanocyte formation.
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“Melanin is the natural protection mechanism of your skin to prevent UV damage. ” Vitamin C also protects skin from UV damage, and although melanin is protective the way that it happens (the link between cancer and melanin concentration) is not completely understood. I guess people using products that make skin more UV sensitive should use sunscreen protection(as most products already recommend). I don’t see how this can cause adverse effects if you have a certain amount of care.
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