Cosmetics companies are lying to you — What is Hyaluronic Acid (HA) and why do they want you to put it on your face?

Don’t forget to wash your brain

As a child, I was always annoyed when seeing TV commercials showing young models with perfect (digitally enhanced) skin smearing tons of cream on their faces and saying how old they are and how much those creams with HA in them would help them look younger. How hypocritical do you have to be as a marketing company to do that? At least show a relatively older woman who actually has such first world issues that the lines on her face make an impact in her daily life.

Let’s ignore for now the implications that, as a woman, what your face looks like is more important than what you do every day and how you communicate and create value in the world. These implications are what the whole world of cosmetics relies upon for survival (almost, I do hope there are some companies out there that only care about the actual well-being of the people using their products) and that discussion is too broad for this little foray into the interactions between HA creams and your face.

As I was growing up and the Internet was becoming a thing for lower/middle-class people like myself, I started to distance myself from the TV and those annoying ads. I would still see offline ads in various catalogs from MLM types of companies. Their state-of-the-art, never-heard-of-before, highest-sought-after and most expensive skin products always contained HA. Adding this substance to various creams was beginning to become a trend and its presentation as a “science-backed product” would fool people into buying crappy, but expensive products with the simple promise that “this revolutionary molecule will revolutionize your face and make you look like an 18-year-old”. Some even had claims that “scientific” experiments had been conducted on volunteers that were never more than ten and who had not used the product for more than 48 hours. They reported “positive” changes, but without quantifying anything. As a young future scientist, I always dismissed those ads as phony, laughing at the foolishness of the marketing team that had cooked up such a puffed-up story in the hopes that some people would believe them and actually buy the products. I had a feeling that this scam would soon disappear.

Now I never watch TV, I haven’t for more than a decade, but I’m still interested in news about my own country and sometimes I visit the websites of some local televisions that also broadcast online. I hate ads and have successfully been using an ad blocker for many years now, but it can’t block the ads that are broadcast in the stream.

So here I am waiting for the actual news to begin, since it’s a really crappy time for democracy in my country, and this (badly dubbed) ad jumps up at me with the same manipulations and fake claims as fifteen years ago. How can that be? Have people not learned anything? Is anyone buying this stuff? Why is it even allowed to make such claims on television in the age of science?

I’ve been involved with science my whole life. I love most aspects of it (there is space for this discussion later) and I’m pretty involved with it, seeing as I’m a post-doc researcher doing work on cartilage for the past year. I like to read about all parts of science, including medicine-related studies, psychology, chemistry, biology and, of course, my current field of work, NMR (which is not relevant in this discussion except as a driver for my knowledge seeking), so naturally I ended up reading a lot about HA for my work. Reading about bad science and marketing, on the other hand, is purely for my free time (and fun, reading is fun).

As I was patiently waiting for the commercial to be over, I realized that many people have no idea what the deal is with this substance that’s on everyone’s lips (well, in everyone’s lips nowadays) and why it’s actually not such a good idea to put it on your skin.

A little background

As you may (not) know, Hyaluronic Acid is an essential substance in our bodies, but it’s not part of our cells, rather it’s part of what is called the Extracellular Matrix (ECM for nerds). Imagine a thick soup where the bits of vegetables are the cells and the liquid surrounding them is the ECM. In the ECM you have a lot of water (remember that saying that we’re 70% water? most of the water is in the ECM) and all sorts of goodies for your cells. Except this soup doesn’t flow and keeps its shape because the HA and other big molecules form an elastic structure that keeps everything in place like a three-dimensional net. If it weren’t for HA and the other molecules that attract water molecules and keep them under osmotic pressure, we’d be all dry sticks, instead of the plump, fluffy, lovable creatures we are (and we couldn’t move, talk or eat).

Here’s a cute drawing I made for a poster, based on literature, of what HA does in cartilage, as an example. HA is the blue line, everything else is what actually keeps your knees hydrated so you don’t walk directly on your bones.

So we should think of HA as our hidden hero in every living second of our lives. But of course we take it for granted until some random ad tells us that we need more. “Here, buy this stuff and give us all your money, your face will thank you”.

If you know anything at all about polymers, you know they’re long chains made up of some identifiable blocks (monomers) that have different properties depending on the number of blocks and how they’re connected with each other. HA is not quite a polymer, but it’s really similar to one, it’s a polysaccharide, a long chain of sugars. It’s produced and recycled by our cells every single day, based on what our bodies encounter in the environment and what we do to our bodies. It seems like different parts of our bodies require HA of different molecular weights (different chain lengths), which is produced locally for specific uses. At the same time, many chains are being broken up by enzymes and those nasty free radicals that everyone hates (and which are in fact a natural byproduct of chemical reactions that happen in the chemical reactor that you are — all day, every day). As we age, the production/recycling process slows down, but that’s also because our whole bodies slow down.

Our bodies have not been selected for being in tip-top shape after our reproductive years (fortunately, we’re not yet making babies based on our genomes and their implications for old age and disease), so it’s normal that things slow down. What’s not normal is that some people like to pretend that they are younger by using various deceit devices, instead of taking advantage of life experience and bringing value to the world. Also, what’s not normal is that more and more people of all genders and ages use ever increasing amounts of makeup to hide/enhance features and then complain that their faces age too fast, without taking the time of day to consider that the products they put on their faces and the harsh chemicals they use to make up/clean off every single day are not helping.

So what’s the deal with this acid, then?

In simple words, putting HA on your face (in whichever formula you prefer) has the same effects as putting on a thin layer of silly putty. It dries your face and makes you question your sanity (oh, OK, maybe that was not the best comparison, but it sounds fun and I just found out we even have people who actually put glittery silly putty on their faces).

I searched a bit before embarking on the journey of writing about this substance in the hopes that others have seen this truth and have made it public. Except for very few instances (which actually advertise their own HA-free products, so I will not link them because of that), most articles and videos that I’ve found praise the thing as if it’s the second coming of coffee to the Old World.

It seems that even the people who advertise products containing HA out of the generosity of their own profit-driven-on-the-backs-of-honest-unknowing-customers hearts don’t really understand how the chemistry works in this case.

Let’s take it step-by-step. You buy a can of youth-in-a-jar, which can be a serum (ahem, solution of HA in water) or a cream (a normal cream with a minuscule amount of HA) and read the instructions. They say to clean your face and apply the thing. You do everything as instructed and nothing happens. Then you slather on your usual amount of crap (sorry, but that’s what it really is) and go and have a wonderful day, sweating through four layers of foundation, powder, highlighters and whatever else they call those layers these days, making regular trips to the bathroom to pick out the muck from your eyes and remove flecks of various colors from your nose, mouth and surface of your corneas and to “refresh” your lipstick, meaning a whole new layer of crap on top of the half-dried, half-smudged crap from earlier in the day. Then you get home, forget about all of it, get in bed and wake up looking like Godzilla.

Sound familiar? No? You clean off the muck before going to bed and apply a mask that will open your pores, so you can later pour alcohol in them to shock them into submission? Then apply another layer of HA enriched cream and let it make your face young overnight?

Guess what. It doesn’t work. The “miracle” molecule everyone swears by doesn’t actually do what you think it does. Despite the claims of all those people that want to sell you their products, Hyaluronic Acid doesn’t make you look younger, nor does it make your skin go back in time. It just gives you an illusion of power based on what is known as the Placebo effect (yes, that thing where you think you’re getting a good treatment, so you feel better about your prospects, so your stress goes down and your overall well-being improves and some of your ailments that were actually caused by stress go away).

So far, I have not been able to find a single scientific study that shows beyond any doubt that putting a cream with HA in it on your face will reduce your wrinkles/improve elasticity/make you look 20 years younger. The only study that I did find didn’t have a control group (who would use the same creams/treatment, but without HA), so I can’t trust its results [1]. Ok, after digging for a while, I found a few more. Let’s take them one by one.

This one [2] claims that there is an improvement when using products with HA and there’s also a control part in the study (one eye gets the “treatment”, the other doesn’t). But the “significant” beneficial changes they report are 5–6% compared to the original and the control. That’s even less than the standard deviation of the original data (meaning that there is a high variability of the original values of the measured hydration of the skin). How does a 5% change in the hydration of your skin improve your self-image? Can you even perceive a 5% change in anything around you in your life? Even if you’d like to look at the photos in the article (which you can download only on ReseachGate — it took me several hours to find out where I could get a copy), they’re actually not comparable because some of the photos have less contrast than others, so they’re useless there. But hey, when someone from the industry funds this research, you just smile and wave, right? And, of course, report on a “significant improvement” that’s lower than the standard deviation of your original data.

Another article that is based on a clinical trial [3] uses a concoction of human growth factors and HA, but without a control group and without testing just one of the active ingredients, to see which of them would actually show the effects they noticed. So, as the human growth factors had already been studied by themselves and had shown a reduction in wrinkle depth and an improvement of the UV-damaged skin, we don’t know whether it was only them that brought about the improvement of the quality of the subjects’ skins. There is also the effect of the UV protection that all the subjects received and used, and this factor had not been considered (nor had the occupation and sun exposure/use of UV protection of the subjects been considered before the trial).

These are all examples of bad science. Science that says something that you are tempted to believe, but when you look at the actual meaning of the words (and the data, which is much more important), is just another way of saying “we have no idea if this stuff does what we say it does, but it seems like it to us, so we’ll just say it does”.

What would be needed in this case, as the science of it is pretty straightforward and there are many tools out there that the scientists are already using in their studies anyway, is a large trial with just four products based on the same formula: a simple cream, a simple cream with a UV screen ingredient and the same two creams with a quantity of low molecular weight HA. These would be used by many people of all ethnicities and in different walks of life, with different sun exposures, different seasonal changes of the air humidity and sun ray intensity, in different seasons (as for examples, in the Northern hemisphere the sun is barely seen during late autumn, winter and early spring, so the skin rejuvenates by itself).

Then, with all this information and a random assignment of one of the four creams for one eye and no special treatment for the other for each person, the results would tell us the truth. Is it the simple cream? Is it the UV protection? Is it the season? Or is it the HA? Until then, we’ll just blindly follow every fad and trend in the hopes that something will somehow make us feel better about ourselves.

On your face, in your face, what’s the difference, in the end?

What I didn’t mention before was that while searching for research done in this area, I found a really nice review article that illuminated me on the legitimate and highly recommended uses for HA [4]. The most interesting part is the one about the HA with low molecular mass (short chains) which can penetrate the skin, as opposed to the high molecular mass HA which is actually found in our bodies and performs normal daily functions.

Sure, the cosmetics companies know this aspect and have been advertising products with nano-sized globules of HA, but what happens when you put this stuff on your face? Not much, as the small globules pass into your skin and just sit there until they are degraded by enzymes, just like the normal stuff. Maybe they attract some water molecules that stay around for a while, but without constant application of the product, the effects wear off pretty quickly, especially as the HA itself is in such small quantities and such small units. At least they don’t just sit and aggregate on your face and make your skin dry out from the inside, which is what did happen back when nobody cared about molecular weights.

There are of course many uses of HA, even in cosmetics. It is used in clinical settings, as a filler for skin (through injections — there are many resources that discuss the efficiency of injecting HA in your face, I won’t cite them here), as a biocompatible material that retains moisture and helps build a skin scaffolding for wound healing, especially for large area wounds and burns, as a drug delivery mechanism for drugs that need to be delivered topically (through the skin surface), as a skin protection for cancer patients undergoing radiation therapy, as a replacement for the synovial fluid in joints (the liquid that lubricates and separates your bones in joints and doesn’t let them rub one against the other). There are probably many other uses which I haven’t stumbled upon, but they all take advantage of what HA can do inside your body, through (most of the time) an invasive procedure.

One last thing about this subject and then I’ll shut up for a while. Even if we did have some nice results from clinical trials based on HA on people’s faces, we still wouldn’t have the certainty that it would work for your face and the product that you use.

Scientists always have to use the highest purity, highest quality substances their budget can allow for, as low quality materials cannot ensure repeatability, which is one of the principles of science (if nobody can repeat your experiment, then your experiment sucks), nor can they ensure that the work gets published (no editor wants to publish articles based on shoddy materials, no matter how brilliant the scientists who wrote it are).

But the cosmetics industry doesn’t care about the principles of science, so they’ll put just about anything in those creams. Sure, there are many regulations in place, but who makes those regulations? Ha? You guessed it, the politicians who are not scientists, but who enjoy the benefits of being lobbied on and pampered by big cosmetics companies.

Did you ever hear of titanium dioxide (TiO2)? Do you know what it does? Do you know what happens when you put TiO2 nanoparticles on your face? Do you want to find out? I’ll write about that soon, as it’s also been connected with my past research and it shocked me when I found out.

My point is that you don’t know what’s in that product and the companies that make it don’t want you to know. Even if you buy “pure” Hyaluronic acid sodium salt (a.k.a. Sodium Hyaluronate) to make your own solution to put on your face (why you would ever do that is beyond me, but there are people out there doing this), you still don’t know how the substance was extracted, what it was extracted from (a bacterial colony or a rooster’s organs? hmm, difficult to choose which one to prefer) and how it was treated afterwards.

There are many ways to protect your skin and make your face look younger and radiant and none of them include putting a substance that’s in your joints on your skin. I’ll detail them in my next article on “The unexpected ways in which you’re making your face look less interesting than it really is”. Until then, have a look through the resources that I found on this topic and if you want more, I’ll give you my reference list of articles that I’ve found while researching this piece and you can start from there.

Next time you see one of those ads, just remember everything you’ve learned today and laugh at the fools who think they can fool you. And don’t forget: you should put Hyaluronic Acid IN your face/joints/wounds/etc., not ON your face.

References for those who care:

1. Jegasothy SM, Zabolotniaia V, Bielfeldt S (2014) Efficacy of a new topical nano-hyaluronic acid in humans. J Clin Aesthet Dermatol 7:27–29

2. Pavicic T, Gauglitz GG, Lersch P, et al (2011) Efficacy of Cream-Based Novel Formulations of Hyaluronic Acid of Different Molecular Weights in Anti-Wrinkle Treatment. J Drugs Dermatol 10:990–1000 .

3. Lee DH, Oh IY, Koo KT, et al (2014) Improvement in skin wrinkles with use of a preparation containing human growth factors and hyaluronic acid serum. J Cosmet Laser Ther

4. Brown MB, Jones SA (2005) Hyaluronic acid: A unique topical vehicle for the localized delivery of drugs to the skin. J. Eur. Acad. Dermatology Venereol. 19:308–318