Michelle from Lab Muffin Beauty Science
here and I have my plant jacket on which
means it's time to talk about
antioxidants. You'll hear words like
antioxidant oxidative stress free
radicals and reactive oxygen species
thrown around all the time in skincare
and diet and supplements in shampoo. What
do they all mean? You've come to the
right place to find out. One of the key
ways in which your body ages is through
oxidative stress which is a fancy way of
saying free radical damage. Free radicals
are substances - molecules or atoms - with
an unpaired electron. Electrons like to
be paired up so free radicals are really
reactive. They really want to get an
extra electron and get a pair. They're so
unstable that they'll take an electron
from anything that's around to become
more stable. When a free radical takes an
electron the substance that loses the
electron to the free radical, it becomes
oxidized which is why it's called
oxidative stress. The substance that lost
the electron used to have an even number
so now it has an unpaired electron so
now it's really reactive and will take
another electron from another substance
and so on and so forth. We now have a
chain reaction. A lot of the free
radicals in living organisms contain
oxygen and so they're often called
reactive oxygen species or ROS. The most
common free radicals in humans are
superoxide and hydroxyl.
Stealing electrons might not sound too
bad but in the process you have breaking
and making of chemical bonds which
causes irreversible changes in the
substance's structure and function. If you
want these processes to occur then it's
a good thing. Free radicals are useful
and in fact essential in lots of things
like free radical polymerization which
is used to make most of the plastics
that we use today. They're also important
in lots of biological processes. Free
radicals are also the reason that
benzoyl peroxide acne cream works to
kill acne bacteria. But if free radicals
form in the wrong place at the wrong
time then they'll react with whatever's
around in the skin. That means they'll
react with important substances like DNA
proteins and lipids and these chain
reactions will cause a lot of
microscopic damage that's eventually
reflected when you see your skin, like
wrinkles fine lines thinning skin
pigmentation and even cancer. Free
radicals can also trigger inflammation
and other pathways in your skin that
lead to damage like increasing the
amount of matrix metalloproteinases or
MMPs
which are enzymes that break down
collagen in your skin, the collagen that
makes your skin plump and bouncy
So now we know that free radicals are
harmful where do they come from?
Free radicals are formed during normal
biological processes like respiration
where oxygen is used to break down food
to give our bodies energy. These are
unavoidable. But environmental factors
like UV light from the sun, pollution and
smoking can cause more free radicals to
form in your body and these will all
affect your skin. In your skin UV is
particularly bad. Free radicals form in
your skin within around 15 minutes of UV
exposure and they'll keep on being
produced for up to an hour afterwards.
Both UVA and UVB can cause free radical
formation. UVA penetrates deeper into
your skin so can cause deeper damage. How
can we reduce free radical damage?
Obviously we can avoid these
environmental factors - we can stop
smoking and we can reduce pollution in
our cities. To avoid UV we can stay in
the shade or we can cover up our skin
with sunscreen and clothing. But we can
also prevent free radical damage after
they've been formed and here's where
antioxidants come in
An antioxidant is a substance that can
neutralize free radicals
They're usually substances that are
pretty stable with an unpaired electron
and so once the free radical takes their
electron the chain reaction will stop.
Essentially antioxidants are like
sacrificial shields or sponges that
intercept the free radicals before they
have a chance to react with more
important biological molecules. Your body
naturally contains antioxidants that can
soak up these free radicals.
There are antioxidant enzymes like
superoxide dismutase, catalase and
glutathione peroxidase. There are also
smaller antioxidants like vitamin C and
E, coenzyme q-10 which is also known as
ubiquinol and glutathione.
However these natural antioxidant
systems that our bodies have evolved
over time can get overwhelmed if there
are just way too many free radicals.
That's why a lot of people try to
supplement their bodies with extra
antioxidants from so-called super foods
supplements and skincare. It's debatable
whether antioxidant supplements actually
help. Clinical studies have gone both
ways on this, probably because it's hard
to control where the antioxidants
actually go in your body, so they can
even do things like help keep unwanted
cells like cancer cells alive. Luckily a
lot of food that's healthy for other
reasons like vegetables and fruit are
high in antioxidants anyway. In terms of
skincare it's a lot less complicated.
Since your skin is on your outside it's
a part of your body that gets a lot of
exposure to environmental sources of
free radicals especially UV radiation
from the Sun, so it's one of the parts of
your body that can benefit a lot from
the extra antioxidants
There are a lot of antioxidants in
skincare products but not all of them
have studies to back them up. Like with
any other skincare ingredient whether or
not the antioxidants actually help
depends on whether or not they can get
to the right place to work.
Here are some antioxidants that have
studies to back them up. Superoxide
dismutase and catalase
these are antioxidant enzymes that are
naturally present in your skin. Catalase
is also promising for helping prevent
gray hair. Vitamin C or ascorbic acid
Your cells are made of a watery inside,
the intracellular fluid, surrounded by an
oily cell membrane, and in between the
separate cells there's also more watery
liquid called extracellular fluid.
Vitamin C is water-soluble so it's
naturally found inside these watery
compartments the intracellular and
extracellular fluid to help protect you
from free radicals. Vitamin C is also
important for making collagen and works
to reduce pigmentation so it's a really
good ingredient for aging and
hyperpigmentation prone skin. I've talked
about it before in my video on treating
post inflammatory hyperpigmentation. Pure
ascorbic acid is the version that has
the most proven benefits especially when
we're talking about antioxidant effects
but the esters can potentially work this
way as well. Vitamin E is vitamin C's oil
soluble counterpart and it's also
naturally found in your body in the oily
parts like the cell membranes. Coenzyme
q10 or ubiquinol is an antioxidant
that's also important in energy
production. Its levels decline with age
and it's a popular supplement for heart
health even though it's uncertain
whether or not it's actually effective.
You can also use antioxidants that you
don't normally find in your body like
plant antioxidants. Many plants have
evolved to have potent antioxidants in
them to help protect them from UV since
they're exposed to a lot more UV than
organisms that can stand up and walk out
of the Sun. Some examples of plant
antioxidants are polyphenols flavonoids
isoflavones and anthocyanins. Some of
the antioxidants that you'll find in
skincare that have some studies to
support them are ferulic acid, which
comes from cereal and is great at keeping
vitamin C and
E stable you'll find the three
ingredients combined in a lot of
products like Skinceuticals CE Ferulic
and Paula's Choice Vitamin C serum. Green
tea polyphenols are potent antioxidants
especially epigallocatechin-3-gallate which
has somewhere between 25 and a hundred
times the antioxidant ability compared
to vitamin C and E. There are other
antioxidant polyphenols in tea as well
like epicatechin epicatechin-3-gallate &
epigallocatechin. The greener and
fresh of the tea the higher the
antioxidant content. But there are ways
to help preserve the antioxidants in
products. Resveratrol is another
antioxidant that's commonly used in both
skincare and nutrition it's found in
grape skins and red wine. Genistein is an
isoflavone antioxidant that comes
from soy products. Lycopene is a red
antioxidant that's found in lots of
fruit like tomatoes watermelons and
apricots. Idebenone is a synthetic
variation of coenzyme q10. Apart from
these there are lots more antioxidants
that haven't been tested much yet in
clinical trials but have had good
results in in vitro and animal studies
It's worth remembering that not all
studies are well designed and can be
biased and things that work in vitro and
in animal studies might not work on
human skin and a lot of it will depend
on the formulation of the product.
It's hard to work out exactly which
products are going to be effective
because so much depends on the
formulation of the product and not just
the active ingredients. Some of the
factors that need to be considered
include whether the antioxidant stays
active in the product until you apply it
to your skin, whether the antioxidant
penetrates the skin and gets to where it
needs to be to work, whether enough of
the antioxidant penetrates to make a
differenc,e so if you have a lot more
free radicals than antioxidants then it
won't make much of a dent in your free
radical damage. Unfortunately there
aren't many reliable ways of measuring
how antioxidant a particular product is
and there aren't many studies on the
effects of different formulations so
it's hard to compare different products.
But while we wait for new research in
the meantime here are some guidelines
that should increase your chances of
getting an effective product. The
antioxidants that have the most evidence
to back them up are vitamin C or
ascorbic acid, vitamin E, ferulic
acid, green tea polyphenols, coenzyme q10,
ubiquinone. These will be your safest
bets. Combinations of antioxidants
usually work better. They're synergistic
and they can help replenish each other.
For example in one study a combination
of 15% vitamin C and 1% vitamin E
protected against UV damage twice as
much as vitamin C on its own and adding
ferulic acid helped even more.
Antioxidants should also be applied
before free radicals form so before you
go out into the Sun. If you apply it
afterwards the antioxidants won't have
time to intercept the free radicals
before they attack your body. That's all
from me! If you like my videos I would
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beauty science. Byeeeeee
