Newer, Better, Purer, Stronger: An Exosomes Update

If you’re someone who sighs at the thought of trying to get your head around exosomes, I feel your pain. But honestly, exosomes – and the potential they have for rejuvenating the skin and reviving dozy hair follicles, make them worth the mental effort.

The quick recap: exosomes are tiny ‘vesicles’, nano-sized bubbles that cells send out to communicate with each other. The ones secreted by stem cells contain a heap of things – like growth factors, peptides and cytokines – that have a big role in cell repair. Along with stimulating collagen and elastin production, they reduce inflammation in the skin and speed up wound healing, so they’re great for rapid recovery after tweakments.

Best of all, here are three bits of exosome-related newness that have caught my interest in the past few weeks.

1. The painless way to have exosomes? With magic gloves?

The aim with exosomes is to get them into the skin. In UK aesthetic clinics, you’ll find exosomes being microneedled into the face (uncomfortable but tolerable), blasted into the skin on a stream of pressurised, super-cooled oxygen (bizarre and chilly but not uncomfortable), or applied after fractional laser (comfort levels depend on the intensity of the laser).

Or, you could have them massaged gently into the skin with special gloves that are at the same time conducting cell-regenerating Quantum Molecular Resonance (QMR) into the skin. That’s done as part of a skin-reviving Rexonage3 treatment I tried at the Geneviv clinic in Belgravia, where there is a strong emphasis on delivering effective treatments as painlessly as possibly to their elite clientele. Rexonage3 is pricey (from £500 a session; from £1,100 with exosomes) I can’t begin to explain QMR much beyond saying that it’s entirely non-invasive and the frequencies the machine generates work to renew cells in the skin; if you want to explore what it is and does, the Telea Medical website is the place to look.

2. Which are the best exosomes?

Aesthetic-medicine conferences are bristling with stands selling exosomes made from plant, marine, animal and possibly even human sources. (Any exosomes from human sources are of course illegal in the UK, but if my sources are correct, some brands simply repackage them in more law-abiding wrapping for the UK market). Which ones are best? It’s really hard to say. The brands of marine and animal-derived exosomes diss the plant-derived ones as useless, though all brand can offer a dizzying (at least, to my non-scientific brain) amount of data and studies to ‘prove’ that they work, and many practitioners tell me they get great results with plant exosomes.

Into this confusion steps Dr Zunaid Alli, who I bumped into at the recent IMCAS congress in Paris (among 18,700 attendees? That was a piece of luck). He was giving a talk on what makes one brand of exosomes better than another – and his key takeaway is that what really matters in terms of the effectiveness of exosomes, and therefore the results that you get, is not the source it’s from, but the quality of the exosomes themselves. Wow.

“If you’ve got good quality plant exosomes, or good quality marine exosomes,” says Dr Alli, “they would deliver as good a result as the others or even the human ones, not that we can use those in the UK. The purification process also makes a difference. You don’t want to have any particulate matter that could potentially be immunogenic in the product. It’s really the purification and filtration process that will give the purity. The source has to be good, the process has to be good, and then essentially the final product will be excellent.”

So… which are the purest, best quality exosomes? Dr Alli didn’t divulge. But watch this space.

3. Are Bacterial Exosomes Simply The Best?

Dropping a charge right into this morass of a debate around exosome sources and creating huge waves comes Dermalogica, which has just launched a bacterial-derived exosome product called Exo Booster which the company claims gives superior results to human exosomes. Good grief!

If you’re thinking “What on earth?”; that Dermalogica is a nice skin brand that does some great facials, it’s time to adjust your ideas: the company offers an extensive menu of skin treatments at its “skin centres” including microneedling, and has put years of research into this new product which adds extra oomph to the results of the treatment.

How much extra oomph? Clinical studies, they tell me, have shown that Exo Booster “significantly improves post-treatment outcomes” with an 86% greater reduction in the appearance of wrinkles and a 46% increase in skin resilience compared to the treatment (either microneedling, or Tixel, or Ultraclear laser) alone – and that in split-face studies (that’s with one product on half the face, and the other on the other), Exo Booster gave superior results to human exosomes. Time to start an orderly queue for treatment at your nearest skin-centre?

What do you find more interesting about exosomes and would you try them? Find out more on our tailored exosomes treatment page.