The products that de-aged my skin

I do love a bit of active skincare, i.e. products with ingredients that can make real, beneficial changes in the skin by boosting hydration, improving skin firmness and reducing pigmentation. And I’m always curious to see the results they give. I find it very hard to assess changes in my skin by looking in the mirror, so I need expert help here.

If you follow my Instagram Stories, you’ll know that I have frequent appointments with Nick Sinclair and his Visia skin-imaging device, which measures the extent of wrinkling, sun damage, skin redness, and more, and comes up with a ‘Truskin’ age – i.e., how it rates my skin compared to my actual biological age. By keeping tabs on my skin’s various data points, we end up with a track record of how my complexion has fared over the years, of what difference specific tweakments, or skincare regimes, have made. (And before you ask, I test skincare ranges in between trialling tweakments, so as not to confuse the results.)

So, what have I used over the past year, and what has made a real difference to my skin?

Environ

First up, I spent last summer using Environ skincare (disclosure: I was working with Environ at the time, though there was no expectation that I’d use the skincare for months on end or post about it) and had a selection of products recommended for me by the fabulous Joanne Evans of SkinMatters. You can’t self-select your own products with Environ; you need one of their trained aestheticians to assess your skin and come up with a regime that will suit you (products cost from £35-£120). There was a pre-cleansing oil, a wash-off cleanser, moisturisers and serums, all full of effective doses of active ingredients such as vitamin C and vitamin A… and the products were lovely, so I went on using them.

Result: I was amazed when a random October Visia session rated my skin three years younger than it had been in June – because usually, my skin ends up drier and with more pigmentation and fine lines at the end of the summer.

AlumierMD

Next up, AlumierMD, which describes itself as medical-grade skincare. That’s often seen as a contentious phrase in that there is no legal definition of what it means, but in essence, it’s a carefully formulated range of excellent skincare with highly active ingredients, that is popular in aesthetic clinics and renowned for giving great results. (Disclosure: again, I was working with Alumier at the time, but they didn’t pay me to say that).

After a thorough consultation about my skin and the types of products I like to use, I was kitted out with a whole set of products including the Prep & Enhance Discolouration Kit (£256) which includes a potent antioxidant with vitamins C and E, a 0.5% retinol serum, an ‘Intellibright’ serum of brightening agents, and a very nice lightweight physical sunscreen called Clearshield. I used these with diligence for a couple of months, then made another date with Nick to see what changes had come about.

Result: An improvement of two years. Over the festive season, my Truskin age had crept back towards normal (alcohol? Dehydration from central heating? Redness/ inflammation from too much sugar? All of the above?). But after two months of Prep & Enhance, it was back in line.

Morphiya

Since then, I’ve been trying a product that sounds like science fiction. For a start, it’s made with exosomes, tiny intra-cellular messengers that have huge potential for repairing and improving the skin. The active ingredients are actually ‘hybrosomes’, a combination of exosomes (taken from bovine umbilical cord blood) fused with liposomes – fatty particles that can transport cosmetic ingredients in the skin, which appear to have remarkable powers of regeneration in the skin.

Morphiya is being launched in the UK in the autumn by Dr Tunc Tiryaki, who is one of London’s best-known facial plastic surgeons and who has a strong interest in regenerative medicine. The product comes in simple packaging, and a 30ml bottle will cost £320. How do you use it? ‘Just put it on twice a day after cleansing,’ says Dr Tiryaki. ‘Using this on its own will do your skin more good than any other skin cream you could find.’

Bold words, but he has just written an article for Aesthetic Medicine magazine detailing a small single-blinded clinical trial on the product (that’s where the testers didn’t know if they were trying the real thing, the half-strength real thing, a 0.2% retinol cream or a dummy/control cream, but the researchers did). The trial showed that both the hybrosome creams were 30% more effective in reducing wrinkles when compared to the control cream or the retinol cream. So I followed his advice, and used Morphiya with sunscreen in the morning, and on its own at night.

Result: Again, it has hauled my Truskin age back to 50 (back? Yes, every time I step off an active-skincare-regime for a few weeks, my skin-age creeps up). Impressed? You bet.