What is the one thing you want to know about a beauty product above all other things? How about “Does it work?” In the beauty universe, this is the equivalent of “Does God exist?” or “Why Donald Trump? Why?” The unanswerable existential questions.
I cannot, in this space, provide answers about the Supreme Being or that other person; I’m just a beauty editor. As for a particular skin-care product, I can definitively say it actually may work … depending on how you define “work.” And “actually.” And “it.”
This new product, called Plated, contains human platelet extract, and it’s been making plastic surgeons and dermatologists practically giddy. But first you’re just going to have to get over a few issues:
1. The exosome factor, which is not to be confused with human platelet extract, even though lots of people (oh, hi!) do. If you’re an avid skin-care consumer, you may roll your eyes at the word “exosomes.” You’d raise your eyebrows too, were it not for all the Botox. That’s because exosomes and stem cells are wildly overhyped in skin-care products today. Most of them have little proven effect on human skin because they come from plant sources—stem cells and exosomes from apples are particularly popular. We’re humans, not apples.
2. The ick factor. Platelet extract comes not from bright-red apples plucked from the tree but from human blood sourced from blood banks. Deal with it. Skin-care manufacturers seem to be on a constant quest to see how much disgustingness the public can stomach. And how much is that? A whole lot. Do the words “sheep placenta” ring a bell?
The serum in question is named after the platelets that provide its fuel. And while it sounds as if David Cronenberg were overseeing product development, the makers of Plated assure me that the blood they use comes from F.D.A.-registered blood banks to ensure it’s sterile and safe. The platelets are then processed and released to meet an antioxidant assay that assures consistency from batch to batch. Plated calls its vesicles Renewosomes to distinguish them from the exosome hoi polloi.
One excited doctor is Dr. Joely Kaufman, a board-certified dermatologist with the Skin Associates of South Florida and Skin Research Institute in Coral Gables. She uses the Plated Intense Serum on herself—especially to eliminate under-eye puffiness in the morning—and recommends it to her patients. She says the extract is safe because it’s cell-free. The vesicles are also “small enough to get through the skin.”
Skin-care manufacturers seem to be on a constant quest to see how much disgustingness the public can stomach.
The vesicles in Plated deliver messages to the skin cells, telling them to snap out of their stupor and start producing more collagen. “They do all the things we want them to do in terms of regulating growth factors in the skin, adding antioxidants, increasing elastin and elastic tissue,” says Kaufman. “Plated’s antioxidant properties are far superior to other antioxidants and far more powerful than vitamin C for prevention.”
Kaufman has witnessed Plated’s effects on redness. One of her colleagues applied the Plated Calm Serum after she was treated with a Fraxel laser. “Her redness went away in 15 minutes.” As a basis of comparison, when I got Fraxel last fall, it took several unsettling days for my lobster-esque hue to fade. Kaufman believes there’s hope here for rosacea sufferers, as well.
Another esteemed expert whose heart quickens at the promise of this technology is Dr. Steven Dayan, a board-certified facial plastic surgeon and author of the best-selling book Subliminally Exposed. He’s conducting a clinical trial of Plated at DeNova Research, in Chicago, to see if it helps patients recover more quickly from a CO2-laser treatment. “The patients who got Plated healed so much faster,” he says. “They had less redness; they had less downtime, and less crusting. They also felt they looked better, they looked younger. So overall, it was a significant improvement versus the patients who were just getting the placebo.” He intends to submit his study to a peer-reviewed journal.
The addition of platelet extract may represent a significant advancement in skin-care products. “We all put chemicals in our body for a while. We did plant-derived ingredients, and now we’re transitioning to human-derived ingredients,” says Emily DeGrazia, founder of Plated Skin Science, in Rochester, Minnesota. Yes, that Rochester, home of the Mayo Clinic, where DeGrazia’s husband, Dr. Atta Behfar, is the director of cardiac regeneration. He is an innovator in the use of exosomes in regenerative medicine and worked on the development of Plated.
The Mayo Clinic origin story gives the product an extra glow. “A lot of the time we see products that are solely marketing,” says Kaufman. “This is real medicine with real science.”
And while the skin-care part of this operation is entirely separate from Behfar and his research, there’s connective tissue linking them. He and his team are exploring the effects of platelet-derived exosomes on non-healing wounds, stress urinary incontinence, and orthopedics (specifically, degenerative joint disease). Making my face less red and puffy is not his concern whatsoever, although I’m sure he sympathizes.
Dayan believes Plated will help with brown and red spots. DeGrazia mentions some of the possibilities of the platelet-derived exosomes on vaginal dryness, hair transplantation, and tissue repair. “The future’s going to be injecting it, no doubt about it,” says Dayan. Alisa Lask, the C.E.O. of Plated Skin Science, says, “We’re working on something that’s going to be an injectable for wrinkles that’s not going to be a filler. You’re going to signal your own cells.” Perhaps, if only for my sake, they’d like to hurry up.
“There’s so much that exosomes will revolutionize in medicine that’s coming so fast and crazy.” says Dayan. “To think that in the early 80s we thought [exosomes] were just waste products.
“We’re just scratching the surface of what exosomes can do. The fact that you can take this little carrier and put in whatever you want, it’s really quite dramatic,” he says. “Who knows, maybe one day we’ll treat skin cancer with it. This is all speculation, but I would check back on this every six months.”
And you know what? None of Kaufman’s or Dayan’s patients seems to care where the platelets come from. Lukas Matsson? Armie Hammer? Whatever! They just want to know if they work. All signs point to yes.
Linda Wells is the Editor at Air Mail Look
