What’s Wrong With Retinol?

In this video transcript, our licensed esthetician Kate responds to a customer’s question: “What’s Wrong With Retinol?”

Hi, it's Kate!

One of the questions we had gotten was, what's wrong with retinol?

And I'm happy to answer that. And just to qualify and clarify, this product (Activated Night Serum) does not contain retinol. This product contains a retinol alternative called the bioactive-A complex.

But retinol, what retinols do, they're pretty intense on the skin.

Of course, you can get retinols via prescription. You can get them over-the-counter. They act as this kind of, like, intense blast to the skin. So there's this really quick exfoliation that's happening when you're using a retinol. Which can, in short term, give you that kind of lifted look, but it can actually break skin down over time.

And so prolonged use of retinol, any variation of a retinol, is actually not supporting the long term goal of having a very lifted look to the face. It it actually can break skin down with time.

It also has a high potentiality of being a more intense toxin, if and or when this is crossing into the body. So there are some studies that have just reported back that high levels of retinol can be pretty intense and a little bit too much for the body.

So, this is one of the things that we just don't do here at Annmarie Skin Care. We are pretty stringent about what we allow in our products.

No retinol here. Just the bioactive-A in this product.