The clinical skincare world is constantly changing, adopting new technologies, ingredients, and methodologies to improve their products. The development of ways of measuring cosmetic effects is driven by increasing pressure on cosmetic companies to provide solid evidence to support product claims.
FREMONT, CA: The development of tools for assessing cosmetic effects is being spurred by mounting pressure on cosmetic corporations to back up their product claims with credible data. Instrumental evaluation is oftentimes utilised to give data to support claims related to the reduction of facial wrinkling, which is one of the indicators of ageing that are frequently the subject of severe scrutiny from regulators and rivals. Additional claims relate to increased skin moisture, improved skin texture, elasticity, smoothness, and sebum management. Moreover, claims are not limited to skin-related cosmetic effects. Moreover, advancements in hair strength, conditioning, and styling products that maintain their qualities even in humid environments are measured.
The limitation of instruments can often be overlooked, which makes this a challenging topic. The distinctions between the skin's micro and macro topographies and the tools used to measure each are seldom understood. A consumer's understanding of what is meant by the term "moisturisation" may differ from a cosmetic scientist's. To the consumer, moisturisation is a combination of textural, frictional, and visual qualities like softness, smoothness, and a lack of obvious dryness. Cosmetic experts have devised methods for determining how much water is present on the skin's surface and refer to it as the water content of the stratum corneum.
Hydration
When deciding how to construct clinical trials to back up a claim, knowledge of the instruments and their limitations is crucial. The Corneometer is one of the most often used tools for measuring skin moisture, so it is important to understand the technique and safety measures that must be followed. Corneometer bases its measurement on the capacitance of a dielectric medium, and it can detect changes in the dielectric constant brought on by hydration of the skin's surface. Products applied to the skin have very little impact on the readings, and even little variations in the skin's degree of moisture can be detected. The first 10-20 m of the stratum corneum are the only depths that can be measured due to the measuring head's design. If the impact of deeper skin layers is to be avoided, this is crucial for the examination of epidermal moisture.
It measures the water content of the skin, although barrier function, which may be measured by transepidermal water loss (TEWL) through the epidermal surface, is only indirectly estimated by this. The rate of water loss through the skin is measured by the TEWL value, which also serves as a gauge for the potential severity of damage to the skin's water-barrier function. Higher TEWL values indicate greater water loss and are consistent with increased damage to the stratum corneum's barrier function, which may happen during irritation exposure, self-excoriation, or atopic dermatitis. This is because water loss through the skin typically occurs by passive diffusion through the epidermis.
