An accurate and objective measure of the health or how badly damaged our skin &/or hair cells are has previously not been possible or available.

The absence of such a measure has led to widespread speculation and argument about the impact of lifestyle choices and products on our health and how we age. To what extent does alcohol, smoking, pollution or excess sun exposure really damage our cells? Which foods damage our cells and which foods or supplement actually boost our cells ability to repair previous damage and reduce their damage/age status.

We are in contact with a new diagnostic capability that can potentially bring a benchmark of truth to the study of lifestyle impact and exploring the potential of making it available.

Tests have been developed by scientists with expertise in dermatology and mitochondria which work on samples of skin or hair.  The tests measure the extent to which the environment has damaged your cells and consequently provide an accurate metric of the health/damage status of the cells within hair or skin. This damage status effectively equals how old those cells are.

Mitochondria exist within our cells and are responsible for production of the energy of the cell. Mitochondria have their own DNA distinct and separate from the DNA within the nucleus of the main cell.

As Mitochondria function becomes compromised, as a result of environmental damage, they reach a critical point of decline after which they become the largest source of excess reactive oxygen species (free radicals). Free radicals are the main means by which adverse environmental interaction causes damage to the systems within our cells. They can be visualised as flying round like bullets within our cells randomly colliding and damaging the various systems responsible for all cellular function.

After the critical point of decline outlined above, mitochondria become the largest source of excess reactive oxygen species (ROS) and consequently the surrounding location has the highest concentration of damage. The DNA of mitochondria therefore represents a good indicator of the damage status (age) of the cell in question.

By measuring specific patterns of Mitochondria DNA damage the tests can measure the aged status of the sample being examined.

The tests therefore represent a rich source of information allowing us to measure the impact of lifestyle choices on the age and state of repair of our cells. Which foods really help us and to what extent do our favourite vices really do damage? Finally a potential means of looking beyond the marketing literature and the raging war of words between rival scientific camps and objectively measure for yourself what works for you and what impact your lifestyle choices really have.

For our journey of creating damage repair cosmetics, these tests are an invaluable resource. Anti-ageing cosmetics on the market are focused on primarily measuring reducing wrinkles but this represents only one aspect of the visual signs of ageing. Having a test that measures something that underlies all the sags, bags, lines plus loss of elasticity and vibrancy gives a means of establishing what really works and what doesn’t.

We intend to use these accurate metrics of the accumulated damage to hair and skin cells to establish in due course whether the damage repair cosmetics we create are successfully boosting natures repair systems and measurably improving the health of  hair & skin.