Science and skincare
A Harley Street dermatologist decodes the secrets of healthy and beautiful skin
Globally, consumers spend hundreds of billions of pounds on products and treatments with the goal of achieving a healthy, attractive and youthful appearance. These include prescription and non-prescription topical treatments (creams, ointment and gels), laser and energy treatments and injectables such as botox and dermal fillers. For many of these products marketing, branding and positioning plays a greater role than efficacy in determining commercial success with successful products often having minimal evidence of benefit and expensive products being no more effective than cheaper products.
As a consultant dermatologist and researcher in the field of skin cell biology more about me I am often asked for my opinion on the merits of these different products and treatments, however I would strongly encourage anyone interested enough to read my opinion to also perform their own research and evaluation.
Summaries (abstracts) - and often the full text of articles - for virtually all important medical research articles are available for free on pubmed, a US government-funded website. I will often link directly to these abstracts or give the pubmed ID (PMID). Entering this ID in the search bar will bring up the relevant article. You can also search for articles directly. For example, searching for “topical retinoids” gives more than 3000 articles.
Results are returned in date order and whilst comprehensive, the sheer number of articles returned can be overwhelming. Another useful resource is Google Scholar. This also will list scientific articles, but returns them in order of the number of citations which tends to correlate at least approximately with the importance of the article.
In an ideal world, a study - for example of a of a new skin cream that proposes to improve the appearance of aged skin - would be randomised (subjects divided randomly between treatment and control groups), double blinded (both the subjects and the individuals running the trial are unaware of which group subjects are assigned to), have a large number of participants, be conducted over a sufficient period of time and have objective measurable outcomes. In reality, due to the enormous costs of performing such rigorous studies, many (most?) skincare products and treatments lack such robust evidence of efficacy. This should not be taken as evidence that they are ineffective, but it does mean that we are often required to incorporate subjective opinion and clinical experience into the evaluation.
There is also an enormous amount of useful information available on the web, however it can be challenging to distinguish reliable sources from less accurate content. Good starting points for trustworthy information on skin conditions and treatments include DermNet and the comprehensive range of patient information leaflets created by the British Association of Dermatology.