Vitamin C in Cosmetic Products – Does it work? episode 211

Perry Romanowski (0:00)

Hi, I'm Perry, and you're listening to The Beauty Brains.

Welcome to The Beauty Brains, a show where real cosmetic chemists answer your beauty product questions and give you an insider's look at the beauty product industry. This is episode 211, and I'm your host, Perry Romanowski. And today is just a beauty brain show, as there's only one of us, it's a solo show. Valerie is a bit under the weather. Since this is a solo show, I'm gonna mix it up a bit. And I'm just going to focus on one topic and answer a few questions that we got that's related to that. These include, first, are there different grades of vitamin C, since the prices vary so much for the same thing? Two, what is your opinion of the effectiveness of a waterless vitamin C product? And three, does vitamin C really do anything for your skin? I also added an audio question about whether open mouth jars are bad for active ingredients.

But before we get into that, let me apologize for not posting a show last week. I just got back from a vacation in the Caribbean, the lovely Turks and Caicos Islands, and I wasn't able to get a show recorded and put up in time. But I will say that I am proud that despite hours of sitting in the sun, I did not get any significant sunburn. My strategy of using the SPF 50 and then covering most of my skin in a towel and staying in the shade turned out to be pretty effective. This did prompt me to ponder the notion of the SPF of fabrics, though, and that kind of took me down a bit of a rabbit hole on the subjects. Perhaps we'll cover that in a future show. There seems to be a lot of marketing hype with little supporting science on the subject. Actually, I posted on Instagram about it, and someone even claimed that cotton t-shirts provided no UV protection. Of course, if that were true, I would never get that farmer's tan, where my arms get really brown, and my torso stays pretty light. So clearly t-shirts do provide some UV protection. I'm just not really sure how much.

Anyway, while my sunburn avoidance strategy was effective, my bug biting strategy was not quite as good. I kind of forgot that when I go to the beach in the Caribbean, or on the East Coast of the United States, I get these bites from these little invisible bugs. I have no idea what they are. I think they're sand fleas or something like that. But not right now. I have over like 100 welts all over my legs and arms from these bug bites. And the thing is, you don't even feel them when they're biting you. So it's not like mosquitoes when they're flying around and you feel it right away. These things, I wake up the next morning, and I just have welts all over my body. And they itch really bad, too. Now, a little tip for you. Remember to pack some deet the next time you go to the beach. I wonder how many people suffer from these invisible bug bites like me. Because it's funny, my wife and I go to the same places, the same beaches, and she didn't get bit by any of them. It's just baffling to me. I guess the bugs just like me.

All right, let's move on to the main show topic, vitamin C. Now, Randy and I covered the topic way back in episode 31 pretty thoroughly, but I thought it was time that we could revisit it, and we had a few questions about vitamin C. This is an ingredient that gets lots of positive press. A look through Google Trends actually finds that it's been steadily gaining interest over the last 10 years. Right now, it's about the same level of interest in Google searches as CBD for skincare. So, you know, we'll save a look at CBD for another show, but let's take a look at vitamin C in this show.

Vitamin C is a chemical called ascorbic acid, and it has a wide variety of functions in our bodies, but most notably as an antioxidant. It is not naturally produced in our bodies, so we actually need to get it from our diet. Fortunately, a lot of foods that we eat, either they have vitamin C in them naturally, or we fortify them, the vitamin C, into our products like, you know, breakfast cereals or something like that. Vitamin C is known to play a role in collagen production in the skin. Additionally, when topically applied, it's thought to help heal acne, increase the skin barrier function, which reduces moisture loss, it helps to protect from UV radiation, and prevents and lightens age spots. So, it sounds like a great ingredient, really, which is why you see it in a lot of skin care products, and it's raved about on beauty blogs, of course. That's the effect of marketing. Of course, there is a downside to vitamin C, and it's an antioxidant that's highly reactive with oxygen in the air and water, so it's difficult to deliver vitamin C to your skin in a way that is stable, effective, and non-irritating. For this reason, raw material companies have actually come out with a bunch of different forms of vitamin C. They modify the basic ascorbic acid structure in the hopes of making it more stable, but still delivering some of the benefits. Now, let's talk about whether this is successful or not. First, the types of vitamin C that you'll find out there, there are a bunch of ascorbic acid, and more specifically, L-ascorbic acid. The L actually just refers to the handedness of the molecule. This has to do with chirality and where specific atoms are located on the molecule, but suffice it to say, L-ascorbic acid is the more active version, and it works better on skin than D-ascorbic acid, which is the less reactive version. Other types of vitamin C that you might see in cosmetic products, sodium ascorbyl phosphate, magnesium ascorbyl phosphate, ascorbyl 6-palmitate, ascorbyl tetraisopalmitate, ascorbyl glucoside, and D-hydroascorbic acid. Now, the ingredient that is biologically active is ascorbic acid. Those other ones are just derivatives, and the idea when you're making a derivative one is you want to make it... So see, ascorbic acid is water soluble. That means it can react when it's in water, and the pH is wrong. And so the idea is if you take ascorbic acid and you make it more oil soluble, it'll be less reactive, and it'll get into the skin better. That's the idea.