So what makes the great retinol? This was a question I had a few years back. I’m not sure many of you know but I’m mixed ethnicity. My mom has blonde hair and my dad has darker skin tones so for me I had a difficulty tolerating retinols or retinoid of any sort. So one of the things we tried to do was develop our own retinol- which took us some time but we ended up developing three different retinols for our patients. One of the main issues I saw with most retinols wasn’t that they weren’t strong enough but the biggest issue was how they would deliver. And thus we first started off on this project- to create a better retinol and improve the delivery system. So there’s two main components to note. First of all, most retinols are water based and the water based retinols are like taking a shot. You can take the shot all at once and it burns but if you sip on that shot over a period of 24 to 72 hours you body doesn’t get this redness, that inflammation and it seems to tolerate retinols way better.

Water retinols are essentially a derivative of vitamin A so if you’re able to tolerate this better you’re going to have less inflammation and it’s going to actually work a lot better in my opinion. So that oil delivery we use instead of the water delivery is one of those key changes. The second change that we did was the addition of micro sponges – now this sounds almost too sci-fi to be real but it’s amazing! There are micro sponges out there and you can actually put them in products and put on your skin. What happens is the micro sponge holds onto the product and it delivers this product over a 72 hour period. So between the combination of the micro sponges, which are biologically in earth and with the oil delivery patients avoid this rush of retinol at once and thus the burn (which is almost a chemical injury or peel of that area; a retinol reaction).

Allowing patients to avoid the retinol burn then permits them to tolerate higher strengths. When we first started with this project we had basically a strength that everyone has, which is a 0.5. We upped our gain and went to a 1% retinol and even then patients were able to tolerate that strength without issue and had amazing results! So we made the strongest retinol on the market at 1.5% – which is crazy strong. That is my favorite product for retinol and pretty much a universally loved product. I recommend this product to almost every rhinoplasty patient and every patient over the age of 30 because of the anti-age effect and the help with oil. And I actually think for rhinoplasty patients it does seem to thin out the skin because as they get older patient’s skin does tend to get a little thicker there.

The caveat to that 1.5% being the strongest on the market is we did come up with a 2% version. This 2% version is not time released and this is not meant to be placed all over your face. This is a spot treatment for acne and it almost evaporates acne because it just shrinks up that oil but again you don’t want to put this treatment, Retinol Tetanoid, all over the face. At present the strongest product we have is Retinol Forza and forza is Italian for strong. The middle ground retinol product we have is Retinol Meso and the lightest product we have is Retinol Layin.

Almost all our patients go right after Retinol Forza. They go with the stronger product and it is something I use at least once a day sometimes even twice a day, depending on where my oil stage is at. And believe it or not I have held off on Botox (I do fillers that’s no secret) but I held off on Botox. I think I have been able to hold off on Botox for so long because I think I have such an almost religious use of retinol and growth factors. So, hopefully that’s helpful on the development of retinol, why I use the retinol, how we came about it and why I think everyone should be on a retinol, but hopefully a well designed retinol better than a poorly designed one.