I measured my skin health every day for 6 months to test a product, and got some high-tech scans done.
But let’s rewind.
My whole family has suuper sensitive skin. My father burns like a vampire in the summer, and the second fall starts we all start getting dry, red, itchy, and have scaly psoriasis flareups, especially on our fingers.
I’ve been testing out skincare products for years, but as a Scientist i HATE how 90% of brands make wild claims with no data to back them up. These days I say no to skincare companies several times a week. BUT. Six months ago a company came to me whose whole team was PhDs, not marketers, and they showed me multiple studies they had done on their cool new peptide–called OS-01 that stops skin cells from going dormant and gunking thigs up. When they put it on just half of people’s faces for 12 weeks they showed improvements across the board.
But would it work for me? I love a good N=1 experiment so I set out to test it, stopping all other products and applying this twice per day.
I had several questions. Would it:
- Stop my skin from getting dry, red, and patchy as it does every winter?
- Help my psoriasis?
- Show visible improvements in things like wrinkles and sun spots?
- Would all of this be quantifiable?
I started by getting a hi-tech Visia skin scan, where they flashed different lights across my face and use high-res cameras plus AI to measure a whole bunch of different metrics. I got followup scans 3 and 6 months in.
But skin can vary a lot day-to day, and even by time of day, so I wanted a more continuous measurement.
Thankfully, i wrote my masters thesis on digitally analyzing facial blemishes, so i set out to photograph my face every single day and then write software to analyze the results.
The key is to take a seemingly ok photo and make myself ugly, really emphasizing those skin imperfections.
This is before, this is 3 months in, and this is last week.
Now for the VISIA scans. Some of the september scan data got lost–not my fault–but we still have the right side for all 3 dates and the rest for 2. Averaging it all together, there was a 33% improvement in wrinkles (85% for these center guys), 73% improvement in pores, 373% improvemet in porphyrins, and the brown spots showed a bit worse on two sides but way better on the 3rd, so that’s a bit of a wash.
And this was all over the fall and winter, when my skin normally gets way worse! This year my face had no dry or red patches, and my fingers were psoriasis free!
Let’s see how the summer goes.
If you guys want to try it, I’ve got a discount code here for ya! Just make sure to report back to me with your results.
Caption:
These porphyrins scans look super cool! I had to research it a bit, but it works because they’re basically bacteria byproducts that happen to strongly reflect UV light.
🔗 in 💁♂️ - The code is AVISHA15
Who’s already tried OneSkin? Let me know your experience in the comments!
Final notes:
- Some of the visible fading of spots could just be due to time since summer. We’ll see how it looks at the same time this upcoming year!
- Yes, I could have fully mimicked the study and just used the peptide on one side of my face. But I’m selfish 😉
@oneskin.co #skincare #skinhealth #ad #science #skincaretips #oneskin #oneskinpartner #skinspan #longevity #healthspan #healthyskin #skincare #skinrejuvenation