Skincare: Don’t Just Follow The Star

The world is awash with skincare products that promise the earth at a reasonable price. That in itself should be your first alarm call – quality ingredients don’t come cheap. The next sign should be a less reasonably priced product fronted by an airbrushed, visibly-enhanced celebrity. This is advertising, not science, and it’s fuelled by money not integrity. 

The skincare I use, is the skincare I make – and I wouldn’t trust anything else.

It was the birth of my son, followed by our first summer holiday and the realisation that there was nothing out there that I’d want to put on my son’s skin – sun protection wise or skincare wise – that led to the creation of my Urban Protect skincare range.

For myself, up unto that point, I’d been using SkinCeuticals. At that time there was nothing better. I even sold a lot of it myself, but then the company was swallowed up by L’Oreal and virtually every week thereafter another product was released. That’s when the quality nosedived, in my opinion.

However, the principle upon which the business was built – revolving around the pivotal research of Dr Sheldon Pinnell – remained sound. There is nothing out there that can beat a quality vitamin C serum for anti-ageing properties.

Most animals have a gene that allows them to make their own vitamin C. Over the course of evolution, humans lost this gene, along with other apes, insects, bats, guinea pigs, some birds, and fish.

Thankfully, we retained the ability to absorb vitamin C, and a quality topical application such as my Urban Protect Antioxidant Serum With Vitamin C and Ferulic Acid results in four to eight times greater absorption than many other products on the market.

Without question, vitamin C is the single most important antioxidant protection you need against ageing. Everything else is simply another event in a cascade of damage.

So yes, if you wish, you can start at the bottom and work your way up by fixing one hundred symptoms of premature ageing, or you can start at the top by preventing or at least limiting the damage in the first place.

That’s what vitamin C does. And that’s why it plays an integral part in my skincare range.

To touch on the science, the protective skin barrier – that armour that prevents the absorption of impurities and dirt – consists of layers of dead skin cells and lipids, the skin’s natural fats.

Lipids are the hard-working guys who prevent sun damage, promote moisture retention, and help skin to heal. They are also vulnerable to external stressors such as a dry or humid environments, hot or cold weather, allergens, irritants, and pollutants.

This is why you need free fatty acids in your skincare – to repair, restore, and maintain skin integrity. While vitamin C reconstitutes collagen, fatty acids reconstitute cell membranes.

So, a lot of the gimmicks that you see now, the biostimulants and the salmon sperm and all that hocus pocus is simply one tiny link in the chain. But, if you don’t have the damage to start with, if you can prevent that damage, you don’t need to start fixing things.

When I was happy to be a media presence in my younger days – before fatherhood and patient loyalty stopped me from spreading myself too thin – I saw a gap in the market once SkinCeuticals went the way it did.

That’s when I first considered not only protecting the skin health of my family and patients, but also the sensible skin-loving masses.

I saw what was on offer, the likes of Dr Barbara Sturm and Dr LEVY and similar doctor brands whose products didn’t stray too far from the path of cheaper off-the-shelf brands, and yet sold for £200 plus, which in my opinion is close to fraud. I know these people personally and I don’t buy what they are selling.

With my mind set on making a product that matters, I decided to find a partner to take it to the next level. Enter Net-a-Porter.

Net-a-Porter was big at the time and they were interested in what I had to offer, visualising it somewhere between LEVY and Sturm with packaging that was sleek and black. I admit, for a moment or two, it all seemed very exciting.

So, I made my skincare, and I made it the best it could be, irrespective of cost. And if you make something irrespective of cost, you can make something very good indeed.

While a vitamin C serum was a no brainer, I also wanted something that protected my skin from the horrors of the modern world.

When in London, I cycle and motorbike to get around the city and I needed an occlusive to create a barrier against the grime and prevent moisture loss. For a while, I used coconut oil, but then I made my Day Oil with Gold Flakes.

Primarily made to provide a protective layer, I have since been told it works wonders for psoriasis, and skin rashes. Some have even reported it halted the onset of actinic keratosis (thick, scaly or crusty skin) and other conditions treated unsuccessfully with pharmaceuticals in the past. For all I know, it’s possibly great for creaky doors and household appliances as well.

Of course, some people have questioned the gold flakes in it, but gold is a gentle skincare ingredient with huge antibacterial properties, making it ideal for blemish prone skin and those with allergies. It’s not a gimmick, it’s science.

And on a side note, only cheap oils are greasy.

I have always wanted an oil because, for me, oils are the only proper, pure and clean way to protect skin. It’s all about the free fatty acids and the lipid part of the cell membrane that we need to nourish in the skin.

So far, I have never found a manufactured oil that wasn’t somehow greasy or heavily scented and that’s because they all use cheap oils. If you use cheap oils you have to somehow disguise it.

In stark contrast, my oils are non-greasy and we don’t scent it artificially. That’s because the Day Oil with Gold Flakes is simply the best oil there is.

When it comes to the Day Moisturiser and Primer with Zinc Oxide, this is the main authentically urban product in the range because it has several ingredients that are designed to form a protective layer over the skin, one that absorbs free radicals and fine dust particles and all the debris that comes with modern city living.

Check the ingredients of most other modern moisturisers and you’ll see there’s nothing more moisturising in it than hyaluronic acid.

While chemical SPFs are not our thing we do use a 10% non-chemical SPF in our moisturiser. With the serum and the day oil, 10% is as much SPF as you need. No one has ever burned. 

So, armed with all these high quality, does-what-it-promises products, I went back to Net-a-Porter, and that’s where the wheels came off the dream.

Net-a-Porter explained that not only do they take a huge margin on products, they also expect you to advertise with them for huge money.

While this might be the logical avenue for all those doctor brands fronting hedge fund money, it was an ask too much for me and the products I cared for. I did not want to turn a wholesome idea into a corporate venture where quality gets slowly eroded or made inaccessible to many simply to satisfy shareholder returns.

Ultimately, I decided to stay small and share my products with my patients.

As we all know – and accept – the trendsetting world of high fashion is a catwalk of nostalgia and absurdity, all of which is fine because it shouldn’t, ordinarily, cause harm.

However, when people’s faces and bodies become the playground of influencers and marketing men, this is not an especially good idea, as history has shown, time and again.

Though we may laugh at the very idea of wealthy women in Ancient Rome buying vials of ‘face cream’ made from the sweat of gladiators, let’s remember that somewhere, right now, someone is rubbing snail slime into their cheeks because someone on TV told them it reduces wrinkles.

Now, one theory behind trending behaviour is that the human brain uses shortcuts, known as heuristics, to make decisions more efficiently.

One of these shortcuts is looking at what other people are doing. So, if enough people are following a trend, repeating a statement, or making the same decision, your brain will assume that’s the correct decision to make. 

When a well-known figure – such as a celebrity – then promotes a product or service, it further influences consumer behaviour.

This is a manifestation of the ‘in-group and out-group’ in social identity theory. Being in the in-group is desired because you become part of the ‘us,’ while the out-group is the ‘other.’

Since celebrities are hugely popular, they are seen as superior members of the in-group. Naturally, people desire to be more like them so they imitate their clothing, their beauty regime, or their facial contouring ‘secrets.’

What people tend to forget, is that this is business, and it’s the dollar that sets the trend and pays for the celebrity – and rarely the product.

When it comes to big retail outlets, I have heard the returns can be between 20% and 25%.

Up to today, I’ve never had one single product returned, simply because I don’t trigger allergies and I don’t have reactions.

Furthermore, the people who use my skincare stay with it because you cannot get anything better.

So, while I cannot offer you a barely-singing, non-dancing celebrity, I can give you a quality offering that is possibly the best thing available and the best product you can buy.

Saying that, I also encourage my patients to go out and try other brands. I do this because I know they always come back to mine.

Of course, when you have something this good it’s a tragedy to limit its scope, so to rectify this, I have recently partnered with an investor in order to roll out my skincare to a wider audience.

We’ll do this by initially placing our products in selected resorts and spas where they will be used in facials – in much the same way as we use them at the clinic.

I like this idea very much because it means that if people who are enjoying their fortnight in the sun continue to use my products, they will reduce the amount of sun damage such an experience inevitably causes.

This is a huge step forward in getting the message out there to help people protect and nourish their skin. In my opinion, everyone deserves to have access to quality products, and I will do my utmost to make this happen.