Ep 185 – The Rogue Pharmacist: The 1% Rule—Understanding Ingredient Labels

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Lamb Probe can empower your skin practice with these new and highly in-demand services. For more information visit lambprobe.com. That's L-A-M-P-R-O-B-E.com and follow Lamb Probe on social media at Lamb Probe. Hello and welcome to ASCP and the Rogue Pharmacist with Benjamin Nightfukes. In each episode, we'll explore how internal and external factors can impact the skin. I am Aggie Stasek, ASCP's education program manager, and joining me is skin care formulator and pharmacist Ben Fuchs. Hey Ben. Hey Maggie. Nice to have you on the show today. Thank you. So there's something in the cosmetic industry called the 1% line or the 1% rule, and basically is my understanding any ingredient after a certain point on the ingredient deck is under 1% concentration. And I'm really excited to talk about this because I think it's important when we're talking about those here ingredients like vitamin C, you want to be sure you're getting a product that is certainly well above 1%. Well, we say in pharmacy the dose makes the medicine. And to me as a pharmacist, I'm always looking for concentrations. I want to know how much of an ingredient, an active ingredient or the ingredients that's doing the work is in a product. That's going to determine how effective the product is. Now, it's not always true that you need a large amount of ingredients in order to get an effect. For example, in the drug world, retinoeic acid is active at 0.1%. But from the most part, you need to have a good percentage of an ingredient in order to number one get an effect. And number two, to drive the ingredient through the skin. There's this concept in pharmacy called fixed law, which says that molecules go from areas of high concentration to low concentration. So if you only have a tiny little bit of something and you put it on top of the skin, there's not going to be enough to push it through the surface of the skin. It's not going to have an osmotic effect of driving that active ingredient through the skin. So you need to have enough of a concentration of an active ingredient, number one, for its effects. And number two, to kind of push it through the surface of the skin. So just putting a trace amount of ingredient isn't going to really do the trick for the most part. And unfortunately, skincare is a lot of marketing sometimes. And so companies will say, well, we have this ingredient vitamin C or we have vitamin A or we have vitamin E or whatever the active ingredient is, but they'll put just trace amounts in the product. And you can assess how much of an ingredient is in a product by where it appears on the ingredient deck. And this requires being able to read an ingredient deck. Now, before we get into that and talk about this 1% concept, and by the way, I didn't know that was a thing. I've been talking about it for a long time. Is it actually a thing? Yeah, it's a thing. Okay, I thought I made it up actually, as a formulator. So I didn't know it was a really thing. So let me, we'll talk about that here in a second, but let's just talk a little bit about this idea of formulation. See skincare products, we'll say the cream or the lotion, which is the standard skincare products, they have an architecture. They have a structure independent of the active ingredient. So the way skincare products are made, and they've been made traditionally, in fact, the modern skincare business is 150 years old or so. But really, the cream and the lotion that we use today was invented thousands of years ago. Galen gets credit for developing the first cream, cold cream, and he was around 200, maybe 100 or in the year 100. So that's like, you know, 2000 years ago, the creams and the lotions that we're using today are basically based on a technology that's 2000 years old. And what is that technology? You take wax, you take oil, you take water, and you mix it together with what's called an emulsifying agent. And this is basically the structure of a cream or lotion. You've got wax, you've got oil. Now they put some pretend oils, I call them things like silicon. But basically, they fall into the category of being like an oil from a chemical perspective. You've got water, you've got wax, you've got oil, and then you've got an emulsifying agent. And these are all derivatives of Galen's original cold cream. Then into that concoction, they'll throw in an active ingredient. And that's your lotion. Usually it's about lotion is going to be about maybe 80 to 90% water. A cream will be about 60 to 70% water, creams have less water and have more wax and oil. Usually it's about 10% or so oil. And then maybe another 5 to 10% of a mollient, which is a cross between oil and water, something like glycerin or propylene glycol. And then you'll have an emulsifying agent, which is usually about anywhere from 1 to 3%. And then you'll throw in your active ingredient. And that's how skincare products are made. In order to understand how this 1% rule that you're talking about, you've got to know a certain amount, a little bit of chemistry. So the first thing you'll do is you'll look at the thickness of your product. If it's really thick, you can assume that on the ingredient deck, it's got about 60% water. If it's thinner, you can say 80% water. The second ingredient on an ingredient deck is usually going to be something like a fake oil or one of these glycols or glycerin. These have an emollient effect on the skin. And they're going to be in around 10% or so. So the first two ingredients in a cream or lotion make up about 7%. In a cream, they'll make up about 70% or so, 70 to 80% of the product. And then in a lotion, they'll make up almost 90% of a product. And then after that, you're going to start to get into your thickeners and your waxes. Those are usually going to be a 2% or 3%. The thickeners may be things like cedal alcohol, for example, glycerol monasterate. And this is going to require an understanding a little bit of chemistry or even understanding a little bit of ingredient logic. So if you see cedal alcohol on an ingredient deck, typically, if you know a little bit about how you put these things together, cedal alcohol is in about 2% in a product, anywhere from 2 to 3, maybe 4%. So because ingredient decks go from in descending order, from highest concentration to lowest concentration, that cedal alcohol or glycerol monasterate or sterile alcohol is going to give you a clue to how much relative ingredient is in there after and before. Because we'll know that there's a certain amount of water based on the texture, based on the thickness, we'll know that the next ingredient is going to be in around 10% or so. It's usually going to be a fake oil like an emollient or a humectant. And then if there's another one, that's going to also be a 10% or so. So you can start to break the thing down and you can start to see how much of your product is useless first of all, because water and propylene glycol and glycerin, they're not going to really have an effect on the skin. And that's also a very important point. In order to have permanent changes in the skin, you have to be at the cell level, glycerin and propylene glycol and water and silicon and all the vegetable oils, by the way, that's going to be somewhere in the third, the third, fourth or fifth ingredient. Those first four, five, six ingredients before you get to the Cetyl alcohol and Styryl alcohol, which make up about 80 to 90% of the product, they're not doing anything. They're sitting on the surface of the skin. Then you get to your Cetyl alcohol and Styryl alcohol, they're in about two or 3%. Now you can start to work down, you can start to see how much of the active ingredient is really in your product. So if you're looking at an ingredient deck, first ingredient is going to be water, maybe 16 to 90%, depending on the thickness of the product. Second ingredient is going to be an oil or a humectant, 10%, maybe another oil or a humectant, another 10%. Then you're going to start to see your 2% points, those are Cetyl alcohol, glycerol monosteroid and such these kind of a waxy ingredients that give the skin body. Then you're going to get to your 1% point. Your 1% point is typically going to be gum, xanthin gum or cellulose gum or some kind of a bouncy thickener in cream and lotion, gives a cream body or gives the lotion body. That's typically going to be your 1% point. So what you're looking for are ingredients like Cetyl alcohol, Sterel alcohol, glycerol monosteroid, various gums like xanthin gum or hydroxyethyl cellulose or different derivative cellulose gums. And then you're going to start to work your way down. After that point, that's where you're going to start to see your active ingredients. Typically they're going to be down towards the bottom. Now, what I'm formulating, my formulations are really weird because I don't follow that template. That's a template that allows people to get into the skincare business and manufacture products inexpensively and also without really understanding anything about the skin. If you're going to work therapeutically and medicinally with a skincare product, you have to understand number one, what ingredients are going to go to the cell? What ingredients are going to be activating for the cell? What is the cell going to respond to? And there's not a lot of ingredients that the cell responds to. That's first and foremost. So when you're talking about they call, by the way, these ingredients that the cell responds to are called BRMs. Biologic response modifiers. And there's not a lot of these ingredients, very few. In fact, if there's 100,000 different skincare ingredients, there's maybe 30 or 40 BRMs. So it's a very small percentage of the overall ingredients that are BRMs. And when you're reading an ingredient act, usually the BRMs are going to be towards the bottom. So what I'm doing, what I'm formulating, is I'm putting my BRMs towards the top. But it's not just enough to have a BRM, an activator of the cells, a biologic response modifier. You also have to have an ability to traverse the stratum corneum. Remember, we have a barrier. That barrier on the surface creates a hindrance to getting things through the skin. Now, the barrier is obviously important and it keeps everything intact and keeps you healthy and feel a barrier issue. You're going to have a problem. So you want a barrier. But if you want to have a BRM effect, you've got to have some kind of carrier to get that active, that BRM through the stratum corneum. So when you're constructing a skincare problem, when I'm formulating a skincare product, I don't want to use that template. Because the template of wax and then oil and then humectant or emollient and then thickener and then gum, those are not going to really help me get my BRM to the basal layer where the cell resides or into the dermis where the fibroblast reside. So when I'm constructing a product, I'm using transdermal penetrance instead of water and instead of wax and instead of silicon and instead of vegetable oils. I'm looking to leverage the rest of my ingredient deck. Why would we want to use an product that has an ingredient deck where 80 to 90% of the ingredients and there aren't doing anything for your skin? To me, it makes much more sense to create a formulation where that 80 to 90% is functional. It acts as a delivery system. So if you're looking for products that, if you're looking to read an ingredient deck to determine the value of a product, you want to make sure that the ingredients before the 1% point are functional. They're doing something for you and they're doing something for your skin either to act as a humectant or a remollient. If you want surface effects, but preferably to help pull your BRM to the lower levels of the skin. So it's very important to understand two things. Number one, how to read an ingredient deck. And number two, how to make sure that your ingredient deck contains all functional ingredients that you're not paying for or using ingredients that aren't having an effect, either a direct effect as a BRM or a carrier effect to deliver that BRM to the cell. So it's very important to understand how to read an ingredient deck from two levels. Number one, where is my active ingredient? Where is my BRM on the ingredient deck? And like I say, from the most part, you want that BRM towards the surface. And number two are the non-BRM ingredients, the non-cellular active ingredients, doing something. And by doing something, I mean delivering or acting as carriers to support the delivery of your BRM to your active ingredients. That concludes our show for today and we thank you for listening. But if you just can't get enough of Ben Fuchs, the ASCP's rogue pharmacist, you can listen to his syndicated radio program at brightsideben.com. For more information on this episode or for ways to connect with Ben Fuchs, or to learn more about ASCP, check out the show notes.