The chemistry of skincare and oxidation

Hi I’m an engineer and chemist and I’ve studied skincare for years experimenting in myself and Tara. I’d like to tell
You what I’ve learned about skin care from a chemical perspective.

We all know about antioxidants. And we all know about free radicals. But how does this actually contribute to how our skin looks from day to day and how can we actually apply antioxidants to where they are needed and what skin care and sun care products do we need to choose and which ones do we need to avoid to get the best skin care? I’ll try to explain all of this and more in the chemistry of skin care.

Let’s start by discussing free radicals. What are free radicals? They Are oxidative molecules which essentially burn our cells. Our body produces free radicals as waste when we excercise and when we are exposed to the sun. It also produces free radicals when it needs to kill harmful bacteria or heal wounds.

Most free radicals are expelled through you lungs or kidneys if they are not quenched where they are produced. This with covid cause lung damage due to additional production of peroxide we can see many of our friends rapidly aging around us due to their inability to eliminate free radicals from their body via the lung or kidney route thus damaging their skin rapidaly as if they are soaking in hydrogen peroxide.

Free radicals are essentially peroxide radicals or more complicated forms of them but fundamentally they have an reactive oxygen which wants to find an electron to quench itself. Most of us have seen hydrogen peroxide bubbling our skin, leaving it dry and wrinkled afterwards. This is what is happening to our skin on a cellular level when it is exposed to the sun, such as after sunburn of when it is infected with microbials.

To quench free radicals we have to provide antioxidants or substances which contain abundant electrons. The simplest way to quench free radicals is to provide abundant hydrogen to the places in the body which have too many free radicals. One way our body generates hydrogen is through fermentation of fiber in the gut. This hydrogen is the most effective form of antioxidants available to the body but unfortunately does not last with age. The body’s bacteria count drops exponentially with age and is as much as 10000 times lower than during childhood is the average adult person. This means much of aging has to do with the loss of Bacteria n the gut. Thus one is the best ways to preserve and even reverse aging in your skin is to correct your gut and populate it with strains of bacteria which ferment and produce hydrogen.

The fundamental reaction produced when hydrogen interacts with a free radical is the neutralization of the free radicals into a water molecule. Rooster farms will carry a hydrogen generator soon. But until then using more standard applications of antioxidants will also work. We also use zeolites to add and retain hydrogen to our skin care products. Zeolites are substances which can absorb hydrogen gas for long term storage.

Anti oxidants are essentially more complicated forms of hydrogen gas, which is the most fundamental and basic antioxidant. Examples of strong antioxidants are vitamin c, polyphenols, and cannibidiol. Thus the application of these substances to a free radical affected area will also quench the free radicals and the damage those radicals are doing on a continuous basis to your skin.