COSMOFACTORY

59 - Skincare and Longevity, featuring SkinModerne CEO Richard Purvis
Deanna: [00:00:00] This episode is about, well, aging and longevity. It's about topical supplements and skin nutrition. It's about consumer education and product claims. It's also about biocompatible ingredients and the emerging science of exosomes. My guest on today's episode of the CosmoFactory Podcast is Richard Purvis, CEO of SkinModerne.
Deanna: Richard, welcome to CosmoFactory.
Richard: Thank you so much for having me.[00:01:00]
Deanna: Yeah, no. I'm looking forward to this conversation. So I think it's fair to say that the foundation of your work is in sports nutrition. Can you say just a little bit about your background and then when you realized that there was potential for nutritional supplement ingredients to be used in topical skincare formulation?
Richard: Sure, yeah. My, um, my interest in kind of the whole wellness industry blossomed out of college, really, uh, played sports in college, and I wanted to kind of. Find ways to, to improve my performance. So supplements at that time seemed like a good option. And so I was all in. I, uh, I started taking all kinds of things, probably a lot unnecessarily, but something about that I liked, I think through the process of doing that, I started, you know, I was, Dr.
Richard: Started drinking the Kool-Aid, of course, at the start, but it. I started doubting, are these things really working? Like I, I, I thought they would, uh, or they were supposed to. And that led [00:02:00] me down a rabbit hole of finding out more about, you know, synthetic, uh, you know, molecules versus food state, uh, molecules.
Richard: And that really got me into, you know, doing more research, going back to school. Um, studying everything I could. And yes, that, uh, that was the foundation for what became my career in this industry. Um, it was really boiled down to one thing, biocompatibility our bodies, being able to recognize the molecular structure of whatever it is that we're putting in or on, and that allowed better assimilation, ultimately delivering.
Richard: Cie that these things are, uh, designed to deliver. So that started my interest in really supplements in that part of wellness. As I, uh, evolved and grew my business, I actually started my own supplement company. Uh, I went from kind of where my interest was, which was sports nutrition, gradually into more general wellness, nutrition, and then, uh, [00:03:00] the latter was into, um, anti-aging nutrition.
Richard: And that led me into doing. Skincare products as well.
Deanna: Mm-hmm. And what was that connection? Was there, you know, we talk about the aha moment with so many entrepreneurs, um, but was, was there a moment when you were like, I can take something that is normally in a nutritional supplement and then use it in a topical skincare? How did you make that connection? I.
Richard: Great question. Um, through the, the latter part of my interest in, in nutrition as a whole, which again was the anti-aging components, I became a member of different organizations in different parts of the world and I would attend a lot of different symposiums and seminars. And one in particular, uh, was in London.
Richard: I heard different speakers. Speaking on different topics related to wellness and topical skincare, ingestible, uh, you know, supplements and all of that. And one scientist in particular was talking about certain nutraceuticals that could be applied topically that had potential of [00:04:00] having subdermal effects.
Richard: So that was really interesting to me because at the time we were manufacturing some of those raw materials. And I had a, a further chat, Tim, after that. And ultimately that led to a meeting with a another. Top British formulator and scientists that, um. I knew exactly what we were doing at, at my company at that time, and he wanted to take some of these raw materials and put them in topically applied skincare and then test them out with our, uh, some of our best clients.
Richard: So that's what we did, and the feedback we got was incredible. So, in a way that was my aha moments, you know, leading into skincare. I think the aha moment as a whole was that biocompatibility component that I figured out, you know, early on, you know, when I started taking supplements myself.
Deanna: Yeah. No, that's excellent. I love it. There's sort of that, that moment of excitement for you in terms of, um, you know, learning. The science and, and um, you know, having a, an educational background, but then there's always that collaborative moment isn't there [00:05:00] when, where it, it helps to put heads together, um, to really innovate.
Deanna: That's, that's excellent.
Richard: absolutely.
Deanna: Yeah. Now I know, uh, um, cosmoprof Worldwide Bologna. Earlier this year you were part of a Cosmo talk session, particularly on longevity. And, um, I like Google as a research friend. So I found out today that the simple definition of longevity is a long duration of life. But what does, what does longevity mean for skincare?
Deanna: You know, our, our listeners are developing ingredients. They're formulating and manufacturing products. How can this industry sector think constructively about longevity?
Richard: Yeah, another great question. Um, I, my personal opinion is that, you know, people use the word anti-aging or the words anti-aging extensively. And, and what does that actually mean? I like to, to. Really bring it back to longevity or, or wellness and, and I think related to skin, anything that we can [00:06:00] apply, whether it's topically or we can ingest that allows our skin to age better.
Richard: Meaning let's not speed up aging, taking certain medications, you know, diet, all those kinds of things can, or having, you know, an incorrect diet can heighten or speed up the aging process through inflammation, irritation, all of that bad, an unhealthy microbiome. So. Really to allow your skin to age better and, and, you know, on a more, uh, youthful biological clock, if you will.
Richard: Um. For me, that's what it's all about. And how do we do that? It's a combination really for me, what's happening inside the body, which starts with our microbiome. Um, a lot of that has to do with how, what our diet is like, what other things that we might take in as well. That if you have all of that right, you've got, uh, your first and best option of having your best skin.
Richard: Topically [00:07:00] that said, you can't just ignore your skin and not do anything and just rely on what's happening inside. It's, it's a synergistic kind of thing. So there are amazing ingredients out there, and really for, for me again, uh, I'm all about more things that have better biocompatibility and our bodies can.
Richard: Recognize. So I'm really, um, a proponent of biotechnology because we can start with a lot of different plant molecules and have them do different things. They are more biocompatibility. We can as or biocompatible, we can assimilate them easier and they can have better effects on our, uh. On the whole aging process and, and taking care of our skin, nourishing our skin, acting as antioxidants boosting biological functions like collagen synthesis or elastin synthesis.
Richard: Uh, a big one is keeping irritation, inflammation down. Inflammation will cause your cells age faster. So as a whole, that is, that is my kind of thinking [00:08:00] around longevity, uh, related to skin. And it's an internal. An outward in and an inside out kind of approach. If you really want your absolute best skin, that is, that is the way to do it.
Richard: And, um, I think that, uh, delving in and understanding ingredients and specifically active ingredients, the role they can play in ensuring you, you're optimizing, uh, that all those steps and, and the overall process.
Deanna: Mm-hmm. No, that makes very good sense. I, I really appreciate that. Um. You know, as I was, uh, thinking about our interview today, I, I, I really started to think about the appearance of, of skin, um, in a way that maybe I hadn't before. You know, we know in, in some markets, especially in the US right? There are very clear regulations that separate I.
Deanna: Healthcare products from beauty care products and, and we're not having a regulatory conversation here, but I wanna ask [00:09:00] about this appearance discrepancy, right? Between health and beauty. I'm wondering if skin that is well-nourished, right? And likely to live a long life, we can think about our skin that way.
Deanna: Does this same skin also look beautiful? Right? Does that face sort of meet conventional beauty standards and. And I, I guess another way to ask is, right, are there aesthetic beauty benefits that have absolutely nothing to do with skin health or longevity? Like, can you, can you help us understand when we're looking at our face or someone else's face or even, you know, maybe clinical testing?
Deanna: Like, are we, are, are we getting, or do we, are we expecting the same thing when we think about skincare for longevity and skincare for aesthetics?
Richard: In my opinion, yes, I think we are. And, and here's why. Because if we, if we are. Taking the best care of our skin that we can. Going back to what I said short while ago. From the inside out and from the outside in, you've [00:10:00] got your healthiest cells, your biological systems are working optimally. And ultimately by doing that and, and things like autophagy come into play here, whereas if autophagy is, um, and you can ask me about that after if you, one of your audience doesn't know what that means, but, uh, basically we are recycling cells or getting rid of damaged components of cells, preventing, you know, kind of the, this, um, cellular.
Richard: Cesspool, if you will, toxicity building up. And that of course creates mutation and, and fear, uh, uh, further irritation, inflammation. But if we we're controlling all of that, you really have your best skin. Your, your cells are at their healthiest. And when our skin is healthiest, we, we ray our, our skin is more radiant.
Richard: It glows better, it looks more youthful. Um, it looks. Healthier. So there is a absolute aesthetic component to that without putting makeup on or anything else. Your skin could look incredibly [00:11:00] healthy and vibrant, um, by doing some of the things that we talked about doing. So yes, I think there's an absolute correlation if that's kind of what you were looking
Deanna: Yeah. Yeah. No, that's interesting. That's interesting. It's always curious to think about the, um, you know, consumer expectations or, or even sort of classical skin. Yeah. Like what is beauty. Right. Um, I, I wanna go a little bit more towards the consumer side before we, um, you know, swing back to the industry side in terms of consumer education in particular.
Deanna: I, I think about your background as you, as you discussed in skin nutrition here. Um. Sports nutrition, um, which, which led to skin nutrition, I guess. Um, because it's not uncommon, right? For cosmetics industry as, and the food and beverage industry to sort of have a, a dialogue, right. To inspire one another, um, in terms of, of trends or ingredients and even collectively educate consumers about these ingredients or even biology.
Deanna: You mentioned, um, the microbiome [00:12:00] earlier, and I think we saw a lot of. Consumer education around the gut microbiome really support, um, advancements in skin microbiome science and the adoption of, um. Products that, you know, support or don't disturb the skin microbiome. Um, I'm, I'm hoping you can help us understand where skincare consumers are in terms of their interest and knowledge of longevity or, well aging.
Deanna: You're talking about pro aging, wellness, all the, all these terms. Where is the consumer? What does, what needs to happen in the consumer education space?
Richard: For starters, I think consumers, there's a broad interest and, and really across the different, um, you know, from, uh, baby boomers of course right down to, uh, gen X and Z there's a lot of interest, um, from, from all those different, uh, uh, age groups. And I think there's, some of them are more adept at, at kind of finding [00:13:00] information thereafter than others.
Richard: But I think overall there's so much misleading information out there. So I think there's a lot of confusion for people so, you know, centered around education. Um, I think a, a good place to start is you can certainly Google stuff and, and get pretty good answers and AI is so good now and it's just.
Richard: Rapidly getting better where you can type in questions, believe it or not, to gr or chat GTP or whichever one you want to use, or Gemini. And they all come up with pretty good stuff and, and, um, it's fun sometimes for me just to go do that because I wanna see how accurate it is. 'cause at one time it was very inaccurate and gave very old information, but it's, it's very up to date now.
Richard: So there's, that's a great source. Um. I, I think that, um, a combination of what's out there, uh, you know, on the internet, being able to maybe decipher stuff that just sounds too good to be true normally, if that's it normally is. Um. [00:14:00] But I think there's a lot of credible information out there, and if, if someone is really interested in learning as, as you know, as much as, I mean, I'm not saying as much as someone like me, but really what they're wanting to find, they want to find answers to those questions that they don't know.
Richard: So I think that, you know, those kinds of, um, AI options are great options. There's also great, you know, PubMed articles on different things, like on exosomes, on, you know, on on Peptides, for example. So there's a lot of good information out there, and typically those are solid clinical trials that have been conducted that make it to PubMed.
Richard: So there's pretty good, um, you know, value in that data. But overall, I think there's, there's so much misinformation and there's a lot of, it's unfortunately led by marketing. So it's hard to know what is real and what is not, but I think doing some of the stuff I said is more likely to lead to what is real and what really [00:15:00] has value for consumers, uh, o
Deanna: a little closer to marketing, if you don't mind. Excuse me for interrupting, but yeah, let's, let's move a little closer to marketing. Um, I'm wondering about like, well, aging product. Do you see particular claims resonating with consumers? Are there claims in the market that feel accurate to you, that don't feel accurate?
Deanna: Are there, you know, you've mentioned, um, um, you know, peer reviewed articles and this sort of thing. Are there particular sort of longevity skincare claims that are well supported with clinical testing? Where do we stand in terms of, of claims and benefits?
Richard: I, um, there are, there are, there are, uh, many claims that are being used that are substantiated. There's also even more that are not, and so, um. The idea of someone, and I'm just throwing this out there. I'm not saying anybody's saying this, but take this and it'll take 20 years off of you and, you know, kind of couple months.
Richard: That just doesn't make any sense to most people. And so [00:16:00] that kind of claim would be reaching. But there are things that show, like with a microbiome, for example, and that's an important part of all of this, because if we have a healthy microbiome, the uh. Chance of assimilating nutrients and allowing them to do what they're meant to do is much significantly higher.
Richard: So just from that point of view, if we've got a better, you know, healthier guts and we're eating right, and we're getting all the nutrients our cells need, I. Cells will be so much healthier. And I would venture to say we can, from a biological point of view, you know, reset our bio biological clocks, so to speak, in five, five years, 10 years.
Richard: That's realistic stuff.
Deanna: Mm-hmm.
Richard: some. Really prominent scientists that are proving that Dr. David Sinclair and Harvard's one of them, uh, Dr. Peter att is another one. So there's some out there proving those things. So I think if, if, you know, going back to the research part of it and, and [00:17:00] education, I.
Richard: There is that kind of stuff available on the internet. And I think going back to how that, you know, with claims and marketing stuff, uh, a lot of the stuff that they're talking about and others that are experts in this and that also have great clinical data out there, um, there are some things related to, you know, the age of the skin.
Richard: Can we reverse the age of the skin? Absolutely. You know, uh, anti-inflammatory kind of things internally will do it on its own. Not ne necessarily 10 years, but a couple of years doing some of the other things like getting our guts right. There's a lot we can do to reverse the aging process and really take years off how we look and feel, and more importantly, internally, we're aging at a different level if we do a lot of that stuff.
Richard: So I think around that, those kinds of claims, there's a lot of substantiation. There is stuff just on the surface as well with things like peptides and growth factors and exosomes that show great, um, [00:18:00] anti-wrinkle properties and, and, and you know, depth with all that kind of thing. Uh, there's a lot of pretty solid data around that as well.
Richard: Um, so yeah. I hope that answered the question.
Deanna: Yeah. Yeah. No, that's helpful. And I, I appreciate your mentioning exosomes because I know this is, you know, um, an, an exciting new sort of movement in the cosmetic ingredient marketplace. Um. For folks who, I can't imagine anyone has not heard of exosomes at this point, but, um, just to, just to remind us, why are exosomes, um, now being used in skincare and how do they fit into this, the, the sort of longevity conversation?
Deanna: I.
Richard: Sure. Yeah. A lot of it's, uh, unfortunately hype because, uh, yeah, it's, it's everywhere. And, um, here's, here's what's exciting about exosomes. If they're real exosomes and.
Richard: They basically have a bunch of different components to them that make them a value for anti-aging and for overall cell health. From amino acids to proteins, [00:19:00] things like growth factors, other vitamins and nutrients. And because of the size of them, they're able to penetrate and deliver these kinds of.
Richard: Payloads, if you will, to, to a deeper cellular level. The the issue really is, is with what they're derived from. So there's mammalian and, and plant derived, and both have some shortfalls. The, the human derived. Getting it from someone else's. Um, you know, let's take a doc that does liposuction, for example.
Richard: That's typically the source of stem cells and exo exosomes for a lot of what's out there in the market. It's someone else's DNA profile. So that's 0.1. There's going to be a natural rejection process two. There, how are you preserving that material? Is there any genetic defect in there for, for starters, for example, that you might be putting in someone else's body?
Richard: But going back to the stability of it is important factor as well. You know, people alize it or freeze them and think that that's going to do it well, there's, there's a lot of trials showing that you destroy some of those, [00:20:00] um. So I personally am not a proponent of the mammalian one for all those reasons, plant derived, um, I, I'm more in favor of.
Richard: The problem with some plant derived is if they're not a true exosome or you really have to have some layers of biotechnology to bring the best out of a, a plant exosome, but you, it's the filtration process. The capture process. There's a whole bunch of things. It's also what the source is, what type of plant, and so those are all.
Richard: Important components, whether you'll have great efficacy or not, or great bio biological value, or none. None. So those are steps that are important to take, but providing you do have good, um, you, you hit all those marks. The, um, biocompatibility is significantly higher with a plant derived exosome. So the, the end result, if you have all of those things in place is you get, um, better biocompatibility, number one.
Richard: But number two, you're [00:21:00] delivering. These amazing, uh, you know, micro and, and, and, um, tiny molecules, nano size molecules to different cellular levels that are able to stimulate things like collagen synthesis, elastin synthesis differently than say, you know, um. An epidermal growth factor or a synthetic peptide, which both of those things have cie, but these exosomes have efficacies on a different level.
Richard: So it, it's, uh, very exciting. One other thing to mention about exosomes that I love, especially plant derived, it's a sustainable source of an active ingredient because the way they grow these things and the way they harvest them, um, very, very sustainable. Um. Without creating byproducts that are potentially pollutants and that kind of thing.
Richard: So really exciting, uh, area around exosomes and I think it's only going to get better and better
Deanna: Yeah. No, that's fantastic. That's fantastic. I, I, I agree. I think it we're very much, um, seeing Exosome science emerge. [00:22:00] In the skincare space and, and there is a lot more to come there and, and certainly more to come from longevity. Um,
Richard: for sure.
Deanna: with us today, Richard, it's all very interesting.
Deanna: I, I have to thank you for speaking with me here on the Cosmo Factory Podcast.
Richard: It's been my pleasure.