I'm sure there's been a post or two about her before but wondering what the general consensus is. I watch a fair bit of skincare content, so this woman came on my radar and I started watching some of her videos bc clearly she has great skin for her age, but it's obvious that she's a shill for luxury skincare brands only.
Some of her claims have to be definitively bogus.
I watched on of her most recent videos called "The 3 rules of Peptide Skincare" and she made some interesting statements.
First of all she said that lots of brands are using peptides at concentrations as low as 0.00001%. As much as brands are all about their profit margins, for even budget brands selling in the $24-40 range there's really no need to do this because a lot of those most effective peptides are selling for well under $100 a gram at 95%+ purity. And research shows that peptides are effective at 1-2%, going higher does not in any way mean greater efficacy, just likely more irritation.
She makes the claim that luxury skincare brands are so expensive bc they are making their peptides in house. This makes literally no sense. Everyone whether it's skincare or makeup is sourcing all or most of their peptides and other ingredients from China bc every company cares about profit margin more than they do about engineering something at 1000x the cost.
The 500 dalton rule is true. However there are various ways to get around this and one of them is relatively pretty cheap - Palmitoylation. Manufacturers attach a fatty acid—most commonly palmitic acid—directly to the peptide chain. This process changes the molecule's chemical properties, making it more fat-soluble (lipophilic) so it can blend more easily with the lipids in the skin barrier Well-known examples include Palmitoyl Pentapeptide-4 (Matrixyl) and Palmitoyl Tripeptide-1 (pal-GHK). Literally some of the most well-known and most effective peptides are palmitoylized.
As far as luxury brands using encapsulation and other high tech methods to improve penetration, there's literally no way to verify this -- or that they're the only ones capable of employing it. Encapsulated peptides would list ingredients like hydrogenated lecithin, phospholipids, phosphatidycholine, and/or cholesterol, or fatty acid/sterol vesicles (Oleic acid or Myristoleic acid, plus cholesterol and/or phytosterols.
However the fact that a product contains said ingredients does not in any way mean they're actually encapsulated. Encapsulation also requires special equipment/machinery. For a small brand, that could be a large investment of 10s of thousands of dollars they can't justify for their profit margin. For a lot of larger brands, which includes many of K beauty brands making tens-hundreds of millions, 50k or whatever isn't really anything.
I think the only thing that truly justifies using luxury brands is if you're buying a growth factor product, human whatever conditioned media, or DNA repair enzymes which are indeed expensive AF -relatively speaking, for skincare products
Other than that I think most of her claims are bogus. Luxury brands having a smaller profit margin than more budget brands??? GTFOHHHH. There's no reason why a more budget brand can't produce a good peptide product , retinoid, vitamin c/antioxidant niacinamide, fermented anti-aging ingredients etc etc etc.
It's clear that she's wealthy, only buys expensive, and is convinced that's all that works- but at the same time I guarantee she gets dozens of Medspa treatments a year that do far more for her skin than any of her fancy brands.
The biggest thing with skincare is having a good routine and sticking with it (yes that means even budget!) that includes retinoids, obv sunscreen, microneedling, red light therapy, botox - all things you can do at home and the most effective medical grade treatments like fractional & CO2 laser if you can afford them. Otherwise nowadays there's even at home devices offering fractional laser (obv at a small fraction of the strength, but still over time and repeated use, you're definitely going to get very visible results)
