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In the 1950s, aerospace engineer Max Huber was tinkering away in his laboratory. The legend goes that he was working on a rocket stabilizer and at the forefront of humanity’s next frontier: space. Then, an explosion in his lab resulted in severe burns all over his body, so the scientist ipivoted to charting another unexplored territory—the deep blue—to create the world-renowned Crème de la Mer.
Though a pioneer, Huber wouldn’t be alone in looking for a way to swath burned skin in concoctions gloriously rich and restorative. As Beverly Hills facial plastic surgeon Omar Hussain, MD, FACS, puts it: “The challenge of treating burns and the long-term issues of scar formation and contractures have led to the development of therapeutic agents designed to guide the healing process.” Though apt for severely affected skin, some of the ingredients and technologies also work for skin that’s more delicately damaged from day-to-day stressors like intrinsic aging, consistent UV exposure, pollution, blue light, and so on.
Biomedical scientist and doctor Augustinus Bader, the man whose innovations stirred the industry into a whir surrounding epigenetic products in 2018—a fairly new field of beauty that looks at how your environment and your behaviors can influence your genes—was initially looking for a “treatment that would provide scar-free healing,” he recalls. Driven by the trauma he saw while studying as a young doctor at the Ruijin Hospital in Shanghai, Bader became a specialist in tissue engineering, with a particular interest in stem cell research.
After 30 years of research, he “developed a revolutionary wound gel that would provide scar-free healing for patients without the need for surgery or skin grafts,” Bader says. Eventually, this led to the “creation of a non-medical skincare mechanism, TFC8, Trigger Factor Complex TFC, a proprietary technology that targets common skincare complaints like the appearance of wrinkles, dryness, and beyond.” The ingredient at the heart of the line features in products such as two known simply by their (albeit vague) names: The Cream and The Rich Cream.
Similarly, ReVive founder Gregory Brown, MD, says that in his position as a plastic surgeon, wound repair was consistently slow, but he observed that human peptides—synthetic epidermal growth factor, specifically—helped speed the process. Extrapolating, he applied the same EGF science, now backed by research, to aged skin. “I began making a makeshift product by dissolving said growth factors into Elizabeth Arden’s Visible Difference Cream, which my mom used, and I would give it to my patients—they loved it,” he says. This in-clinic clamoring ultimately led to the production of the brand’s first product in 1997, the ReVive Skincare Moisturizing Renewal Cream Nightly Retexturizer, launched exclusively at Neiman Marcus.
Cosmetic chemist Stephen Alain Ko makes the important distinction that aging skin and skin severely compromised from a burn don’t always need the same things, and products meant for everyday consumers shouldn’t be used to treat actively burned skin. “It’s important to remember that these creams are generally not used or recommended by doctors in treating burns–especially those that aren’t superficial,” he says. “The recommended treatment for a first-degree burn is to cool and clean the wounded area, then bandage it with sterile gauze; people can then apply an ointment like Vaseline or Aquaphor to help keep the wound moist as it helps with healing and reducing bacteria exposure.”
One such Aquaphor-like product that is sold via prescription in the United States, but over the counter in France, is Biafine Emulsion, a neroli-scented cousin to Vaseline that contains trolamine and sodium alginate, which studies have indicated help speed wound repair for minorly compromised skin, like that from a laser treatment or a sunburn. Today, because of the French-girl fanfare, you can buy it from online French pharmacies—with the proviso that products sold this way haven’t been vetted for authenticity.
This kind of crossover between medical and consumer usage is something that will become more and more commonplace as advancements in technology become cheaper to produce. In fact, many, including sterile packaging, can be helpful for a multitude of purposes. “Avene, for example, uses a combination of sterile filling and packaging that maintains a sterile environment for a line of moisturizers and balms,” Ko says, which limits the exposure to bacteria. Hydrocolloid dressings are another example of medical/consumer crossover, he notes, seen in OTC uses such as pimple patches.
Hussain adds that therapies like platelet-rich plasma (PRP) can speed wound healing, but “when injected into the skin, improvements in wrinkles, skin texture, facial volume, and hair regrowth has been proven,” he says. Unsurprisingly, brands want to be at the forefront of bringing medical technology into their products. Hyperbaric oxygen therapy is a technique that is used in wound repair, exposing patients to 100 percent oxygen at a greater pressure. Element Eight founder Andy Carter, who started his research in burns, eventually moving to tissue regeneration and biomaterials, tried to bottle this technology up, adding oxygen to his formulas, which purportedly help with efficacy because, as he puts it: “Everything needs oxygen and oxygen helps everything.”
According to Hussain, “on a cellular level, reducing inflammation and producing collagen are both a common goal of therapy in burns and reversing the signs of aging.” As we look to future advancements in technology surrounding medical-derived skin care, he says that as we “discover more cellular signaling, which can lead to the regenerative pathway of healing, we can continue to unlock the code to guiding our cells to restoring normal tissue architecture, collagen levels, elasticity, and dermal thickness.”
In medical labs today, in your skincare tomorrow.
