Latest / The Science of Skin / Cosmetic chemist, Richard Parker, discusses the rationale behind how he developed the globally recognized Australian skincare company RATIONALE

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Cosmetic chemist, Richard Parker, discusses the rationale behind how he developed the globally recognized Australian skincare company RATIONALE · The Science of Skin

• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: Hi, I'm Dr.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: Patty Ferris.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: I'm a board certified dermatologist, and I'm your host for this episode of Skin Care Confidential.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: Skin Care Confidential was started by Dr.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: Ted Lane and I, and it's an outreach of our medical meeting called the Science of Skin Care Summit.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: And today I could not be more excited to have somebody who is kind of a new friend of mine.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I met Richard Parker, who is the brains behind the skincare line rationale.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: I guess we met Richard in February at Wendy Roberts' meeting in Palm Desert, which was really a ton of fun.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: Anyone who's not been to Generational Germ, check it out because it's cool, right?
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: We had the best time.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: But I'm going to tell a little story on Richard because he may not know this.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: So you and I checked into the hotel right around the same time.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: I had gotten there earlier in the morning and they didn't have a room for me, so I came circling back and I was looking for my room.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: And I saw this very tall man dressed head to toe in Easy Miyaki.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: And I looked over and I'm like, wow, they must be having a fashion event.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: This is so cool.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: Little did I know that an hour later I was going to meet head to toe Isy Miyaki.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: That is Richard Parker.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: So when I read your bio and they said you're as comfortable in the home in the worlds of science, fashion, and the arts, I thought, touche, that is perfectly said.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: So just to give you guys a little bit of Richard's bio, I mean, he's 100% a global authority on the prevention and rejuvenation of sun and environmental skin aging.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: And we're going to talk all about that.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: He's a cosmetic chemist.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: He has special interest in photobiology and epigenetics.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: He's worked alongside some of the leading dermatologists and plastic surgeons in the world to develop innovative, elegant, and exceptionally effective formulations that really have set a new benchmark in solar protection and solar repair.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: So I am so excited to have you here today.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for taking the time.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, thank you so much for having me on your show, Patty.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_01: I'm so excited.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm going to start because I don't really know much about your education and your background.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I want everybody to hear how did you end up as a cosmetic chemist?
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: Where did you school and what was your journey there?
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's an interesting journey.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_01: And I think to begin, like most people who find their way into the skincare industry, whether it's formulation scientists like me, dermatologists like you, a lot of us are motivated by our own skin problems and our own skin journey.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_01: We're looking for answers.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_01: So I always had a fascination with skincare from a very early age.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_01: I grew up in Australia, where as you know, the sun is very, very harsh.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_01: We live our lives largely outdoors.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_01: So I was a competitive swimmer as a kid and right through university.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um and at about 25 I had sun damage and acne at the same time, and I thought, this is not right.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: This is this is my levels.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_01: On so many levels.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_01: So I thought this is this is my this is my mantra, this is what I want to do.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_01: Straight out of high school, I considered I had to make a choice between music and medicine.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_01: I'm a cellist and a pianist, but I also very, very much wanted to be a doctor.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_01: So I had to choose between those two pathways.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_01: And I chose music, and it was wonderful, and I loved it, and I taught and played for about 10 years, but that desire to be in the skincare industry was still there.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_01: So what I did was I essentially educated myself about the intersection between medical dermatology and cosmetic science or skincare.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_01: Now, in those days, the term cosmosceutical hadn't even been termed or coined yet.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_01: You know, so then we're talking about around 1988, 90, 1990, those sort of times.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um, we had no concept really of what this whole cosmosceutical industry was going to look like.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_01: But so I used to go to Melbourne University, lock myself in the medical library for days at a time, and just read everything I could.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_01: It was largely dermatology textbooks because we didn't have online journals, pharmacology textbooks because we didn't have you know online access to that information either.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_01: And so I guess most of my earliest education was self-taught.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I'm an autodidact, that's that's what I did.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um then later on I thought, well, what do I do with this?
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_01: I I really love this, and I had found some answers for myself, certainly to my acne, you know.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_01: These were the early days of Accutane and so on.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_01: So I knew there were things that could be effective.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_01: So I thought, where do I go with this knowledge and information?
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_01: So I started a small consultancy in Melbourne, in Australia.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_01: And what would happen was women would bring in huge shopping bags of their cosmetics and dump them on the desk, and I would sort through this is good, this is this is not good for your skin, give them a little shopping list, go to the pharmacy, buy this, and I would charge them something crazy like 20 bucks or something for all that information.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_01: But it was great, and what happened was it became so successful that the leading Melbourne newspaper called The Age wrote a double-page story about our consultancy.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_01: Now you can't pay for publicity like that, and it went nuts.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_01: And I thought, women are really hungry for this information, they really, really want to know.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_01: So we had to I had to make a decision at that point.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_01: What do I do with this?
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_01: Do I train more consultants like me to do what I do, or do I go further into this?
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_01: And I decided to go further into the whole product development side of things because I these products did not yet exist.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_01: Remember that there were no vitamin C serums, there were no vitamin A serums, the sunscreen industry was very much in its infancy.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_01: Now, amongst the readers of that article were several prominent Australian dermatologists.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_01: And a couple of them wrote to me and they said, Look, what you're saying about skincare is the first time anything the cosmetics industry or people from your side of the fence they used to say has made sense to me.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_01: As a dermatologist, what you say makes sense.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_01: I agree.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_01: This is the same advice I give my patients.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_01: Use sunscreen every day.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_01: Look into um retinoic acid or retin A for your skin.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_01: So these things that I was talking about made sense to them.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_01: So this group of dermatologists said, you know, could we send you my clients?
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, great, more clients, more patients.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_01: It's not what we really need.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_01: We need to know how to roll this out and create a viable business from it.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_01: Now, one of those dermatologists used to travel a lot to the States, and she said to me, you know, there's this thing starting to happen in America.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's called cosmaceuticals, and it's almost like products or active ingredients that have clinical efficacy but no side effects.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_01: And and they're things that tend to be safe to use, they don't need um regulation regulation, they don't need a prescription, and she was saying it could be things like vitamin C and you know, vitamin B and so on.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_01: Like I think you should look into that.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_01: So I thought, great, I'd love to do that.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_01: And then I thought, well, I need to get qualified.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_01: So I started to research the kind of courses that you could do to put formulations together.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_01: In other words, what we call today cosmetic science.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_01: Guess what?
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_01: Right, those courses didn't exist.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you had to do a degree in uh chemical engineering or a degree in pharmacy, and then basically teach yourself about how to make make skincare products.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_01: Then I found there was one course, this is around 2002, um, there was one course online you could do from the Society of Cosmetic Chemists in the UK, and I enrolled in that course.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_01: It was through De Montford University and was a diploma of cosmetic science.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_01: Now, it was pretty basic, so it was like how to how to make emulsions, how to create gels, what sort of delivery systems work.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_01: It was rudimentary, but I did that course.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_01: So I had a diploma of cosmetic science, and then I began.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_01: I began formulating.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_01: One of my first first projects was working with a dermatologist who was doing huge research into resurfacing the skin with CO2 laser.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_01: So, as you know, that that was a big procedure.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_01: And it was absolutely it was a game changer.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so I became very involved in that early research as to you know what changes occurred in the skin.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_01: And it was at that point that I saw that 80% of facial aging was caused by the sun.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_01: And that changed my life.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_01: That changed my career, and at that point I decided to dedicate my life, my career, my research and my business to the prevention and even the reversal of sun damage.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: And particularly where you were in Australia.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: In Australia.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: Where they had an incredibly high rate of skin cancer.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, particularly.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: Unbelievable.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we have the worst melanoma rates in the world because we, I guess, we have a genetically displaced population.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_01: You know, our population is was, I mean, it's much more multinational now.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_01: But you know, going back 25, 30 years, Australia was a very Caucasian dominant society.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: So we had basically a lot of people in the wrong place at the wrong time.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: In the wrong place.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: Should not have been there.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: Should not have been there.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_01: Should not have been there.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_01: And so they had all the sun damage.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_01: We were learning how to treat it with a laser, but the skincare part was a problem.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: So now there are so many skincare lines out there, of course.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm sure there were, even when you started formulating.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: So what was your inspiration?
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I mean, obviously it was prevention, it was environmental exposure, but how did you differentiate yourself in the marketplace?
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: I know you've been wildly successful in Australia.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: You're just coming into the U.S.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: market.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: So everybody needs to know if you haven't heard of rationale, that's why, because Richard is really rolling it out at this point in time.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: We are.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: But so how do, you know, how did you view what was available?
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: And by the way, I'm old enough to remember when there was no word cosmeceuticals, too.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: And we would sit in rooms with cosmetic chemists, and you know, it was the early vitamin C days, the early antioxidant days, the early retinol days, because retinol hadn't even been stabilized.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: Um, we had retinoic acid, but we didn't have retinol.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: But so, how did you look at what was in the marketplace and then do what you did?
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: And we're gonna talk about the essential six, of course.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_01: Look, I think coming back to that realization, Patty, that 80% of what we see of as facial aging is actually caused by the sun.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_01: And I thought there needs to be a coordinated, synchronized way of protecting the skin from the sun and trying hopefully to reverse sun damage in a non-invasive way.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_01: Now, obviously, the earlier we start, the better.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_01: So I think a lot of that next period of my career was very heavily involved in researching sun damage.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_01: You know, what were the changes that occurred in the skin?
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_01: Why did that happen?
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: Were you looking at histologies or biomarkers or a little bit of everything?
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, the dermatology group I was working with are very, very um keen on understanding histologically what was going on, the changes.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, all the things that we now know are the classic hallmarks of solidity.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_01: Photoaging photoaging, you know, pigmentary changes, um, changes in connective tissue, changes in in differentiation patterns and so on.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_01: So we needed to understand all of that.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_01: So I dedicated a huge period of my life to researching the changes that occurred with sun damage, and then the next part of my career was how do we reverse?
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_01: How do we prevent it happening, of course?
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_01: How do we reverse it?
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_01: And the answer really lay in understanding the skin itself.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_01: You know, so for example, with our laser resurfacing patients, we saw they had immunologic problems.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_01: So they they couldn't use sunscreens because you know the laser actually had an effect on the skin's immune system, but so did the sun.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_01: And I thought, and then we measured their antioxidants.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_01: They're really low in antioxidants.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_01: Was that caused by the laser or was it caused by the sun damage?
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_01: Now we know it's caused by the sun damage.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_01: So we had to look at that.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_01: And then, of course, what sun protection could they use?
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_01: Now, zinc oxide that you know I've been formulating with zinc oxide for more than 30 years, but back then zinc oxide had only been approved in Australia since the 1970s, and it wasn't yet approved in the United States as a sunscreen until I think the late 90s.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_01: So there was a lot of pioneering work that we have to do.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_01: And if I had to summarize the difference with rationale, how are we different from every other skincare uh company in the market, including the US, I would say that Rationale is not a skincare company who do research.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_01: We're a research company who makes skincare.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_01: So research is at the heart of everything that we do.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: So talk about the essential six and explain that to our listeners.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_01: Slowly over the years of research, I realized that it was helpful to think about the skin in terms of systems.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_01: Like, you know, as a doctor, you you study the body as a series of systems or organs or or interactions, let's call them in the skin.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_01: So I thought maybe this applies to the skin too.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_01: So I started again to look at what was happening with people with sun damage, what happens when we treat the sun damage, what happens when we um protect the skin from future sun damage.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_01: And I guess came up with a concept of what we call the six pillars of skin health.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_01: And it's based on my observation that the skin seems to have, there may be more, and you know, research is always ongoing, but the skin seemed to have six separate, I guess, synchronized, interlocking systems that you know, whether everything functioned well, you had healthy glowing skin, when things go wrong, your skin started to reflect that.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_01: So those six systems are.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_01: The skin has an immune system, and that's only recently been elucidated in full detail.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_01: So we now know that the skin has its own immune system with its own immune cells, its own immune functions, and so on, and that becomes depleted by the sun.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_01: That's called, as you know, photoimmunosuppression.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_01: The next system the skin has, it has its own antioxidant system.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_01: Now, today we're used to talking about antioxidants in skin care.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of people don't still realize the skin has its own antioxidant system that again becomes depleted by the sun.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_01: The skin has its own solar protection system.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_01: So this is number three.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_01: The skin's solar protection system revolves around interactions of uh chemicals and polymers, things like melanin, uricanic acid, and so on that protect us from the sun.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_01: That becomes depleted with age.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_01: The fourth pillar of skin health is all about barrier repair.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_01: Now, barrier repair I saw very early as an issue with these laser resurfacing patients.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_01: Their barrier was gone.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_01: We vaporized the entire epidermis sometimes, and they were left with an impaired skin barrier.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_01: So we had to reconstruct, if you like, the skin barrier.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_01: And today, barrier, everyone talks about barrier issues today.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_01: It's implicated in a buzzword, but it's implicated in so many conditions today.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_01: You know, absolutely rosacea, for example.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, acne.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_00: Acne, everything.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, eczema, everything.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_01: 100%.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so that's the fourth system.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_01: The fifth system is all about skin pH.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_01: Now we know this we all know the skin's pH needs to be acidic to be healthy, but what is less known is that as we age and as we get more accumulative sun damage, the skin's pH becomes increasingly alkaline.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_01: Now, minuscule shifts in skin acidity or skin pH can cause quite catastrophic effects in terms of the skin's production of which enzymes are produced.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_01: Are there enzymes that help build connective tissue?
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_01: Are there enzymes that downregulate or degrade connective tissue?
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm talking about things like matrix metalloproteinas and so on versus hydroxylases, which are involved very much in the synthesis of collagen and elastin.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_01: So skin pH was an important um pillar of skin health to retain acidity.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_01: And the sixth pillar of skin health is, of course, DNA repair.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, we know that a lot of sun damage is connected to damaged DNA.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_01: The skin has its own DNA repair system, but again, with intrinsic and with photoaging, that becomes weaker, depleted, not complete, not effective.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_01: So those six pillars of skin health are immune protection, antioxidant protection, solar protection, and then at night, they're the daytime essential three, then the final four, five, and six are at night, which is pH repair, uh sorry, barrier repair, pH repair, and DNA repair.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_01: And that's, I guess, my concept of the essential six.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_01: And I think if I've contributed anything to the literature, I hope that it's that understanding.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_00: Understanding of that.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_00: So give us a little some of the high points about the products and how you addressed each of those.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_00: Because you've got so many great ingredients and your formulations are amazing.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_00: I've I took what I call the rationale challenge.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm such a skinimalist.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_00: I can't using a lot of products is hard for me.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know why, but it just but but I love this system.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna tell you, you you gave us a lovely gift, and some of these products I don't think I can live without, honestly.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_00: I love this sunscreen.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_00: The sunscreen is amazing.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember Vivian Bukai telling me about it and running up to her room when we were at a meeting getting this.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_00: You have to feel this, Patty.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: You have to feel this.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like, okay, I promise I will.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, that's brilliant.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_00: I promise I will.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_00: But it is special.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_00: So kind of go through each one of those and like what sort of ingredients did you pick to address each of those essentials?
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_01: Sure, sure.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_01: You know, one of the loveliest things about skin, I think, is that there are two, well, there are two things I love most about working in skincare.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_01: The first one is you can see if what you're doing is working with skincare.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we take supplements for our brain and our liver and so on.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_01: Do we really know if they're working?
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_01: But with skin, you can see it.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_01: This is either working or it's not, and the evidence is right there for you and the whole world to see.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_01: That's the first thing.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_01: And the second thing, a dermatologist friend of mine said to me once, you know the wonderful thing about skin?
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_01: We can usually get healthy skin back, which is such a gift, you know, and I I love that about the dermatology world.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_01: It regenerates, it's it regenerates, and if you do the right things, it will heal.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_01: And I love that because our skin is the only organ of the body that has to deal with the external environment.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_01: Everything else is internal, it's protected.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_01: So the skin has unique challenges.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_01: So if I if I were to summarize these essential six formulations, or or we call them collections, if I go through them, you've got to do three things in the morning, three things at night, and I'll run through the active ingredients now.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_01: So in the morning, immune protection is step number one.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_01: Now we know from about 25 years ago, the research done in Australia showed that B group vitamins, which of course include niacinamide, but you also have to have the other B group vitamins like folic acid, thiamine, riboflavin, and so on.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_01: All of these B group vitamins are the most important nutrients for the skin's immune system.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_01: And they work topically, which is really interesting.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_01: So Professor Diona Damien, who's a dermatologist at Sydney University, did a massive study about 20 years ago to prove that niacinamide prevented photoimmunosuppression.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_01: So that's how we know the B group vitamins work in that in that field of protecting the skin's immune system.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_01: The second step in the morning is antioxidant protection.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_01: Now, you know, the the research over this in the most recent years has focused a lot on individual antioxidants, particularly vitamin C, but that's not how it works in human skin.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_01: In human skin, all of the antioxidants work in synergy.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_01: Vitamin C replenishes vitamin E, replenishes vitamin A, works with glutathione.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_01: It's very complex.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_01: So our approach to antioxidants is to use all of the skin's own antioxidants in the correct ratios, in the correct concentrations to work synergistically.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_01: So having vitamin C by itself, I don't believe, is enough.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_01: I think you've got to have vitamin E in there.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_01: I think you've got to have uh glutathione, superoxide dismutase, CoQ10, all of these antioxidants that are found naturally in the skin and that are depleted by uh sun damage need to be in the same formulation.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_00: So we do all of those are in your antioxidants serum.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we talk about skin-identical ingredients, you know.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of uh in the cosmetic world, there's a lot of um hype and marketing around this latest ingredient and so on.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_01: I think my philosophy is different.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_01: All of the answers are right there in healthy skin.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_01: All we're gonna do is study healthy skin and see what's gone wrong, what's missing, and how do we put it back.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_01: So that's the anti-ror.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_01: Mirror one.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, exactly, exactly.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, that makes sense.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_01: The third step in the morning is sun protection, solar protection, environmental protection.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_01: Now, as you know, Patty, because I know you're um uh an authority in this field, the sun's energy is not just made up of UV radiation.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_01: The sun's energy is made up of 7% UV, about 50% visible light, uh infrared, and about 43% of visible light.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_01: So we've got UV, which is the smallest part but the most lethal.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_01: Then we've got infrared, which also causes skin damage.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we know there are conditions that are absolutely influenced by um infrared, then we've got visible light.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_01: So the sun's energy in total is what ages our skin, not just UV.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_01: So I've been aware of this for a long time.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_01: The problem we have is that sunscreens, all the sunscreens we see commercially on the market, with the exception I can add uh with authority here, the ones that we've just developed, and there will be others, I promise, um, only block UV.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_01: So we need more than UV protection.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_01: Now, I've mentioned earlier zinc oxide.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_01: I've worked with zinc oxide for more than 30 years.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_01: Zinc oxide is a beautiful sunscreen, it's the only one I like to formulate with because it is so intrinsically right for skin.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we're seeing all sorts of issues with sunscreens from allergic reactions to uh photoimmunosuppression to free radical generation.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_01: So zinc oxide is the only sunscreen that is both a well, it has a triple, a triple um, I guess, benefit.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_01: It's a sunscreen, but it's also an anti.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: Antioxidant in and of itself.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_01: And it's an anti-inflammatory.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_01: It's still the gold standard for diaborash in babies.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_01: So we know zinc oxide is good for the skin.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_01: The problem with zinc oxide up to this point is that it again only protected against UV.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_01: So I did a huge amount of research into what sort of compounds would give us protection beyond UV into visible light and infrared.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_01: And what we found was that more metallic oxides did this.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_01: So many years ago, I started researching the effects of iron oxide.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_01: Now iron oxide, as you know, is not a UV filter per se, but it blocks visible light very, very well.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_01: Very well.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_01: Incredibly well.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_01: The trouble with zinc with iron oxide is that it's it's colored, it's stained.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_01: So we had to work with a Japanese pigment company to create very, very fine, I guess, gradations of iron and zinc oxide.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_01: We call it zinc fusion.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_01: So we fuse the zinc with the iron oxide and it gives you that visible light and that UV protection and it it it's sheer on the skin.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_01: You can't see anything.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_00: You can't see it.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_01: No, you can't see it.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_01: It looks very natural.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_01: The third piece of the puzzle was what about this visible light?
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_01: How this infrared?
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_01: How do we protect from that?
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_01: Well, we found that if we use different particle sizes of zinc, some of those large particles could absorb visible light and infrared radiation and diffuse it.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_01: That was great.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_01: The third big breakthrough came when we introduced a synthetic blue dye called areoglossine.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_01: Now, areoglossine specifically absorbs in the blue light spectrum, which as we know has a lot of problems, particularly for conditions like melasma, for example.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_01: Melasma is so easily triggered by blue light.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_01: Most sunscreens don't block blue light, and so by incorporating areoglossine into our formulation, we were able to provide that protection from blue light as well.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_01: So this is our third step, and we have this series of what we call them zinc fusion superfluids.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_01: So they're very, very low viscosity zinc oxide, iron oxide, areeroglossine sunscreens that block UV, visible light, and infrared.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_01: So they're the three steps in the morning.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_01: I'll go through the three steps at night very quickly now.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_01: So at night we need to repair the skin's barrier, and we do that by using exactly the same what are called intercellular lipids that are found naturally in the skin.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm talking about ceramides, triglycerides, and cholesterol.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_01: And we've got those in the same ratios that they're found in the skin, two to two to four.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_01: And what that does is that it recreates that skin barrier, but it also allows the skin to, um, or I guess encourages the skin to make more intercellular lipids.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_01: So we help the skin barrier repair.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_01: The fifth step at night is all about balancing pH.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_01: So what we use here are hydroxy acids, and the hydroxy acids, as you know, don't really work as exfoliants in low concentrations.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_01: What they do is they shift pH down in the skin so the skin's able to start reproducing its own cells naturally, creating natural moisturizing factors.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_01: All of those things happen when skin is at acidic pH.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_01: The sixth step at night is DNA repair using our retinoids combined with, and this is the crucial difference with rationale, combined with DNA repair enzymes, because that's how retinoids work in human skin.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_01: So that's the essential six.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_00: So what DNA repair enzymes do you have?
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we use uh a whole complement of the skin uh of the DNA repair enzymes that are used naturally in the skin.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_01: So endonucleases liases, for example, um photo uh we also use photolyas in LH2.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_01: So we have the sun protective DNA enzymes, but we also have the ones that create uh DNA excision repair in the skin naturally.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_00: So that combination, again, you're mirroring mirroring what we have in nature.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_01: What's happening in nature and putting it back.
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's the products are lovely, I'm gonna tell you.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_00: They're they're just amazing.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_00: I'm very interested to know what brought you to the States.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_00: So you've been, like I said, wildly successful in Australia.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_00: And you have a flagship in LA, so you can tell us a little bit about that.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_00: But now you're rolling out into aesthetic offices, into physicians' offices.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_00: And that's sort of an interesting strategy.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of companies have tried, some successfully, some not, as you know.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_00: It's a it's a it's a tough market because there's a lot of competition, a lot of, you know, a lot of noise, background noise in the dispensing market.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_01: There truly is.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, dermatologists, I love dermatologists because they are ruthlessly dedicated to the pursuit of truth in skincare and to giving their patients things that really, really work.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_01: The reason that I wanted to bring rationale here is despite the US being the home of cosmosceuticals, so much research here goes into skincare, developing novel new ingredients and so on.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_01: There still was not this coordinated approach to prevention and repair of sun damage.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_01: Dermatologists love to pick and choose from different brands, but there still was a need, I believe, for this very integrated approach to photo protection, photo repair.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_01: If sun damage is responsible for 80% of our skin aging, then there needs to be a focused approach to protection and repair.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_01: And that's why I thought this opportunity exists in the United States.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_01: Now, having dermatologists as our front runners, as the advocates and champions of the rationale brand makes perfect sense to us because people walk into our stores.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_01: We have our beautiful flagships around the world.
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_01: You know, in Australia, we have our own beautiful clinics and we have Singapore, or now we have LA.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_01: People come into our stores and they'll present with medical skin conditions.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_01: Now, this is really serious because what happens to these same women predominantly and men are walking up to cosmetic counters and saying, I've got a problem, can you fix it?
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_01: Now, if someone walks into a rationale store and they've got a condition, say Rosacea, our response is always to say to them, Look, we suspect you have a medical skin condition.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_01: We can help you, but not right now.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_01: Right now, you need to see a doctor.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_01: You need to see a specialist doctor who is a dermatologist.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_01: She or he will have the answers to your problem, and then we'll help you maintain your skin in a beautiful state for the rest of your life.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you don't walk into a gym when you've got a broken leg.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_00: No, you don't.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_01: And you don't go up to a cosmetics counter when you've got a skin disease, but people do.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_01: So they do.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_01: They do, and that interaction, Patty, between us and the dermatology community is critical.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_01: So we love working with dermatologists.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_01: They love rationale because scientifically it makes sense to them.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_01: They can prescribe it with absolute confidence in the actives and know that they're going to see a great result.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_01: But for us, it's important to have that conduit between medicine and beauty and to be able to refer our clients to our dermatologists for treatment.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_01: And then we've stuck, we've done everything that we need to do.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_01: We've uh we've executed our duty of care to help that person get the answers to their problems.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_01: So dermatologists are a huge part of our business.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I know that you've published one study already.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_00: And you have your other study in the work.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_00: So maybe talk just a little bit about the first study because you had some great results in that study.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, we do.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_00: As Richard pointed out, for dermatologists, the studies are everything.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_01: Everything, yeah.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_00: Kudos to you guys for doing them.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I said earlier, Patty, we're a research company who makes skincare.
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_01: The research must come first.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_01: We don't create a product and say, oh, let's see if this works, or let's try and convince people with data and graphs that our product is good.
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_01: It's like, no, what do we need to understand?
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_01: So we needed to understand clinically first what was going on.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_01: So a Japanese plastic surgeon in 2019, Professor Tanaka, did the what is really what we consider the first study on an actual regimen.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_01: Now, in skincare, as you know, we tend to just research one active ingredient and it'll often just be in a vehicle of propylenglycol or something like that.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_01: We thought that's not enough.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_01: We need to understand what happens in real life.
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_01: What happens if you follow solar page?
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_01: We use them all.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_01: And funnily enough, that research had not been done.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_01: So we did a 12-month study on 18 Japanese patients to look at what was actually happening.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_01: Now, Professor Tanaka captured that data through Vectra um imaging.
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_01: So he wanted to show if there were any volumetric changes.
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_01: And what was really interesting after 12 months, of course, we saw all the surface changes, the increase in luminosity, you know, it's finer texture, hydration.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_01: Hyperpigmentation.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_01: Hyperpigmentation, all those things improved.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_01: But what was really astounding was the uplifting effect.
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_01: Because you could see that the patient's face looked rejuvenate, lifted.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_01: It's subtle, but it's there.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_01: And so I thought we need to understand this.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_01: We need to know what this is, what's happening here because we would never have expected previously to see those results with skincare.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_01: But if you think about it, if we're preventing the breakdown of our collagen and elastin and we're encouraging that deposition, it absolutely makes sense that you would see an increase in skin firmness and definition.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_01: So we did that.
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_01: Following on from that, we then commissioned a genetics study, working with the genetics lab here in the United States to understand what genes were up and down regulated to make this happen.
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_01: And that was fascinating because we saw across the six markers immune, antioxidants, solar protection, barrier, pH, and DNA repair, we saw very clearly which genes were being up and down regulated.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_01: Now I'll give you an example.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_01: So one of the most important protective enzymes in the skin is called metallothionane 1A.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_01: And it's like the master, I guess, um, it's the master gene that's responsible for antioxidant and immune protection in in human skin.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_01: And we saw an upregulation of metallothionine using rationale of 86,000%.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_01: 86,000.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_01: They were so shocked at the lab, they called us and they said, are you using drugs in these products?
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_01: We're like, no, no, no, these are all vitamins and natural substances.
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_01: We're not, we're this is legitimate.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_01: So that's an example, Patty, of how we need that understanding at a DNA, as a genetic level, to understand what's happening so we can explain the clinical effects that we see.
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and by looking at the genetic profiling, that's the way to do it.
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_01: It's the future, right?
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_01: You know, everything's now molecular biology and genetics, and we need to understand at those two levels what's going on when we say to a patient, patients come in and say, My skin's rejuvenated, even my husband noticed, you know, things like that.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_01: That we can say to them, well, here's the proof.
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_01: And most importantly, as you said, to show our dermatologists, you know, that that ruthless logic that dermatologists have and that need for empirical evidence, that sits very, very well with us.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_00: And and then in the end, quite frankly, the if the patients like it and the patients see the results, you know, that just comes back to you as a right as a physician recommending a product in spades.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_00: Last thing you want to do is recommend something that doesn't work.
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_00: And that's why everybody looks so hard at the science.
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_00: And it's look, we've had a lot of what I call hit and misses.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_00: You know, they they look like they're a big hit, but then they're just not really that great a product.
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_00: It could be, you know, different ingredients.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_01: I yeah.
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_01: I I was thinking, you know, about this the other night, and I thought it's the same as exercise and nutrition.
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_01: You know, nutrition, every day there's a new fat and so on.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_01: But when we come back to the science, it's pretty much the basics of having the right ratio of proteins to carbohydrates to lipids, proteins and so on.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we know all of those things.
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_01: It's like we don't need to reinvent the wheel.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_01: We need to understand two things.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_01: Firstly, how they're working, what are the commonalities, and then what are the individual nuances that have to be tweaked for every patient.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_01: It's the same with exercise, you know, people are always trying to look for the latest exercise fad, wherein we know you need some cardio fitness, some aerobic and some uh weight, some weight bearing, resistance training, and we need flexibility, you know?
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_01: And then it's just nuancing those differences between individuals to get the very best exercise program.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's exactly the same with skincare.
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_00: So true, so true.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_00: I've I've reached the end of our time, but I want to say that I'm so excited to see you in Austin.
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_00: Richard will be attending the Science of Skincare Summit later this week.
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_00: I know this podcast is gonna unfortunately air after the summit, but Richard's gonna be speaking and telling all of our attendees um all of his wisdom and things that he's learned through all of this incredible science and research.
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, you're a pioneer, Richard.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_00: You're a cool guy.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody loves you.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody loves you.
• 34:28
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, that's good.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_00: I look forward to seeing you later this week.
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_00: And good luck with everything.
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_00: And Rationelle, I think, is gonna hit a home run here in the U.S.
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_00: So best of luck.
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much, Patty, for your interest and support.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_01: I can't wait to see you.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_00: And for all you listeners, if you enjoyed the content, we hope that you guys will subscribe to our podcast, Skin Care Confidential.
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_00: And until next time, take care and thanks for listening.