Rice ferment

Saccharomyces/Rice Ferment Filtrate

Sanghwang mushroom, Phellinus linteus, grown on brown rice that has first been sprouted in mineral water, then fermented and filtered through cloth in the way makgeolli is.

The sprouting comes first, and it changes the grain. Phytic acid, which binds minerals and holds them out of reach, is converted into phosphorus and inositol. Only then is the mushroom introduced.

What the process leaves behind is a filtrate carrying organic acids, amino acids and polysaccharides. On skin it forms a light film that helps hold moisture at the surface.

The rice comes from Gochang, a county in south-west Korea whose entire administrative area was designated a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve in 2013.

Rice bran extract

Oryza Sativa (Rice) Bran Extract

The nutrition in a grain of rice is not evenly distributed. The germ holds around two thirds of it, the bran almost another third. What is left, the white rice people actually eat, holds about five per cent.

Milling removes the germ and the bran because they carry oils that turn rancid and shorten shelf life. This extract is drawn from exactly what that removal throws away.

It carries gamma oryzanol, a compound found specifically in rice bran, along with plant-derived squalene and tocopherol, both antioxidants.

Lactobacillus postbiotic

Lactobacillus Ferment Lysate

A postbiotic. Lactobacillus pentosus is cultured and fermented, and then the bacteria themselves are removed. What remains is the lysate: the cell fragments, peptides and metabolites the culture produced while it was alive.

The distinction is practical as well as technical. A live culture would not survive in a cosmetic formula and would not keep. A lysate does both.

Skin carries a microbial community of its own, and the diversity of that community is part of how skin stays comfortable. This ingredient is used to support that balance.

Rice bran water

Oryza Sativa (Rice) Bran Water

Bran is the outer layer taken off brown rice on its way to becoming white, and it makes up six to eight per cent of the grain. Most of it is discarded.

The water drawn from it carries vitamins B1, A and E, along with minerals and the fine starches that give rice water its cloudiness.

In Korea this is not a new idea. Migamsu, the water left over from washing rice before cooking, has been kept and used on the face for centuries. Ours is drawn from the bran itself rather than from the rinse.

Soapberry

Sapindus Mukorossi Fruit Extract

Sapindus mukorossi is a tree that grows across India, Nepal and East Asia. Its fruit is dense with saponins, natural compounds that foam in water and lift oil away from a surface, which is exactly what a surfactant does.

People washed with it for around two thousand years before anyone isolated a surfactant or gave one a name. The dried fruit was used for laundry, for hair and for skin, and still is in parts of Asia.

In Korean the tree is called muhwanja, which translates roughly as the tree of no worries. The name comes from a belief that one planted near the house kept misfortune from the family.

White clay

Kaolin

Kaolin is a white clay. This one comes from Marajó, an island in the mouth of the Amazon and the largest river island in the world surrounded by fresh water.

The river carries mineral sediment down from the Andes and deposits it there. Fallen fruit and leaves break down into the same ground. What is dug out is a clay unusually rich in minerals and in organic unsaponifiable matter, the fraction that will not turn to soap.

Clay absorbs. Kaolin binds excess sebum and lifts it away without the tightening pull of a stronger clay, which is why it is the one used on skin rather than the harsher varieties.

True cinnamon

Cinnamomum Zeylanicum Bark Extract

Most of what is sold as cinnamon comes from cassia, a related but different and far more common tree. This is Cinnamomum zeylanicum, the one botanists call true cinnamon: paler, milder, and more expensive.

Its bark carries catechin and tannin, both antioxidants, alongside the aromatic compounds cinnamon is known for.

Here it arrives as part of SEPICONTROL™ A5, which pairs the bark extract with capryloyl glycine and sarcosine, both built from glycine, in a combination used to help regulate sebum.

That is a quiet echo of the cleanser itself, whose main surfactant is also built from glycine.

Beta-glucan

Beta-Glucan

Beta-glucan is a polysaccharide, and one of the better-studied ones in skincare. What matters in a cosmetic is its molecular weight and purity rather than where it came from.

Ours is grown rather than gathered. Split-gill mushroom mycelium is cultivated in liquid until it produces beta-glucan, which is then isolated. Not extracted from a harvest, and not built in a reactor.

On skin it holds water and forms a light film, and it is used to help protect the barrier against external irritation.

Rice bran ceramide

Ceramide NP, Oryza Sativa (Rice) Bran Oil, Phytosphingosine

Ceramides make up somewhere between 40 and 65 per cent of the lipids in the outermost layer of skin. They are what holds that layer together and what keeps water from passing out through it.

Most cosmetic ceramides are synthesised or taken from an animal source. This one is built by reacting fatty acids drawn from rice bran oil with phytosphingosine, without solvents or enzymes. Because those fatty acids come from the oil rather than being made to a single specification, the result carries a mixed profile rather than one chain repeated, and a mixed profile holds the surface together more effectively than a uniform one does.

Sake yeast ferment

Galactomyces Ferment Filtrate

Galactomyces is the yeast used to brew sake, and it reached skincare by observation rather than by search. In the mid-1970s researchers at a Japanese cosmetics company noticed that the hands of elderly sake brewers had stayed exceptionally smooth, noticeably smoother than their own faces.

Hundreds of yeast strains used in sake fermentation were studied to find out why. Galactomyces was identified as the one responsible.

The filtrate is what remains after that fermentation: vitamins, minerals, amino acids, enzymes, organic acids and yeast-derived peptides. It is used for skin texture, and for the balance of oil and moisture.

LHA

Capryloyl Salicylic Acid

Salicylic acid takes its name from Salix, the willow, from whose bark it was first isolated in the nineteenth century.

LHA is a modified form of it. Attaching an eight-carbon fatty chain to the molecule makes it more oil-soluble, so it moves through the outermost layer of skin more slowly and more evenly than salicylic acid does. The action is gentler and more selective as a result.

Its pH also sits close to that of healthy skin, around 5.5, which is unusual for an acid and is part of why it is tolerated by skin that reacts badly to stronger ones.

Provitamin B5

Panthenol

Panthenol is a provitamin, which means it is not yet the active form. Once it is on the skin it converts to pantothenic acid, which is what the body actually uses.

It then works in two directions at once. As a humectant it binds water and draws it in. It also slows the rate at which water leaves, so what it brings tends to stay.

It is one of the few ingredients that is both effective and almost universally well tolerated, which is why it turns up in so many products made for skin that reacts to most things.

Vegan PDRN

Sodium DNA

PDRN stands for polydeoxyribonucleotide, a fragment of DNA. In skincare it is almost always taken from an animal source.

This one is not. It is drawn from rice germ, the small part of the grain that milling removes and discards. Korea produces something in the region of 300,000 tonnes of that byproduct every year.

Germ is dense in DNA, which is what makes it worth using, and oily, which is what makes it difficult. Getting a high-purity fragment out of it takes a process built for that problem, which is most of the reason a vegan PDRN took as long to arrive as it did.

It is used in cosmetics for skin conditioning and barrier support.

Rice protein

Hydrolyzed Rice Protein

Protein molecules are large. Too large to do much on the surface of skin, which is why whole rice protein is not especially useful in a cosmetic.

Hydrolysis is the fix. Enzymes cut the protein into smaller pieces, first peptides and then free amino acids, and what is left is small enough to matter.

What comes out of rice in particular is a mix of amino acids, along with some of the vitamins and lipids that travelled with the protein. It is used as a conditioner and a humectant.

Inositol

Inositol

Inositol is a carbohydrate drawn from rice bran, the layer that milling takes off.

It is also one of the compounds that appears when brown rice is sprouted. Phytic acid breaks down into phosphorus and inositol, and that is the first step in making our rice ferment. So the same molecule the process creates is also added here on its own.

It is used for moisture retention and for regulating sebum.

Panthenol

Panthenol

Panthenol works in two directions at once. As a humectant it binds water and draws it in. It also slows the rate at which water leaves, so what it brings tends to stay.

Doing both is the whole job of a cream, and it is why there is five times as much panthenol here as in the essence. The lighter step delivers moisture. This one has to keep it.

Snow mushroom

Tremella Fuciformis (Mushroom) Extract

Tremella fuciformis is an edible fungus, called the snow mushroom or the silver ear, and it has been used in kitchens and in skincare across Asia for a very long time.

Dried, it is a small brittle thing that looks like nothing at all. Put it in water and within about five minutes it returns to its full translucent, bouncy form. That is a demonstration rather than a claim: it shows what its polysaccharides can hold.

On skin those polysaccharides hold water and form a light film that slows its loss.

Zinc oxide

Zinc Oxide (nano)

Zinc oxide is a mineral, and one of the very few single UV filters that covers both UVB and UVA. That is unusual. Most sunscreens need several filters combined to reach broad-spectrum protection.

It is often described as working like a mirror, reflecting ultraviolet away from the skin. That is mostly not true. Zinc oxide absorbs the large majority of the UV it meets, around 95 per cent, and releases that energy as a small amount of heat, much as organic filters do. What distinguishes it is not the mechanism but the location: it works at the surface of the skin rather than within it.

It arrives here in three particle grades rather than one. Coarser and finer zinc behave differently, and blending them is part of how a mineral load this high still spreads and sheers out instead of sitting thick.

Some of that zinc is nano-scale. Nano zinc oxide is authorised in the EU as a UV filter, is among the most extensively studied ingredients in cosmetics.

Ectoin

Ectoin

Ectoin was identified in 1985 in microorganisms living in Wadi El Natrun, a salt lake in the Egyptian desert. Organisms in places like that, salt lakes, hot springs, deserts, produce it in order to survive them.

What it does is order water. Ectoin draws water molecules around itself and holds them in a structured shell, and that shell sits between the cell and whatever is happening outside it.

In cosmetics it is used as a humectant and a skin protectant. A molecule whose entire job is surviving sun and salt seemed to belong in a sunscreen.

Fermented centella

Centella Asiatica Extract, Madecassoside, Asiaticoside, Madecassic Acid, Asiatic Acid, Saccharomyces Ferment

Centella asiatica is the plant behind cica. It grows in wetlands across Asia and has been used on skin for a very long time, and what does the work in it is a group of four compounds: madecassoside, asiaticoside, madecassic acid and asiatic acid.

Most centella ingredients are simply an extract of the plant. This one is more deliberate. It combines three separate extract fractions, taken from the whole plant, the leaf and the root, with all four of those compounds isolated and added at a known purity.

It is then fermented with Saccharomyces cerevisiae, which makes it the second ferment in this formula after the rice. It is used to soothe.

Rice amino acids

Oryza Sativa Amino Acids

These do not come from the grain. Rice callus is a mass of undifferentiated rice cells grown in culture, and that is the starting material.

The protein in it is then broken down by enzymes into free amino acids, which is why the ingredient is declared as rice amino acids rather than rice protein. The supplier's name for it refers to where it started; the INCI describes what actually arrives.

It is used as a humectant and an antioxidant.

Allantoin

Allantoin

Allantoin was first isolated from the root of comfrey, a plant whose old English country name was knitbone, after what people believed it could do.

Most cosmetic allantoin today is made rather than extracted. The made version is identical, purer, and does not require digging anything up.

It is used to soothe, and it is among the gentlest ingredients available for that purpose, which is why it turns up so consistently in products for skin that irritates easily.