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Collagen, peptides and retinoids: what the ageing-skin research supports, and where the marketing runs ahead of it.
10 articles
Rosehip oil has a reputation that outpaces its evidence — but not by as much as you might expect. Here's what the research actually supports, where the gaps are, and how to use it well.
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Caffeine is the star ingredient in most eye creams, promising to banish dark circles and puffiness overnight. The reality is more nuanced — it does something genuine, but not quite what the packaging suggests.
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Snail mucin has gone from niche K-beauty curiosity to mainstream bestseller. The ingredient list is genuinely interesting — but the gap between what's in the filtrate and what reaches your skin is wider than the product pages suggest.
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Polynucleotides are the injectable everyone suddenly wants — and the ingredient serum brands are rushing to bottle. The two are not the same thing, and only one of them has much evidence behind it.
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Hyaluronic acid is the skincare industry's favourite humectant — but the gap between what it does on a lab bench and what it does on your face is wider than the marketing suggests.
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Bakuchiol is marketed as a gentler, plant-derived stand-in for retinol. The headline study behind that claim is smaller and more caveated than the marketing suggests — here's what the evidence actually supports.
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Peptides get sold as everything from 'Botox in a bottle' to a collagen cure-all. They're a broad category, not one ingredient — and what they can actually do depends entirely on which peptide you mean.
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Growth factor serums can cost hundreds of pounds on the promise of cellular regeneration. They're not peptides — they're much larger proteins facing much bigger delivery problems, and the evidence hasn't caught up with the price tag.
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Of all the peptides sold on anti-ageing claims, copper peptides (GHK-Cu) have the strongest research behind them — genuine wound-healing evidence, and cosmetic trial data that's real but more modest than the marketing suggests.
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Copper peptides and Matrixyl have genuine clinical evidence behind them. 'Topical Botox' peptides mostly don't. Here's a category-by-category audit of what the research actually supports, and why in vitro results can't be trusted at face value.
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