Back in charge: Empowering skin’s longevity in the digital age.

Introduction

The past decades have been marked by a rise in the use of everyday technologies. Fueled further by the pandemic and technological developments, the proportion of our lives spent digitally has increased massively. Studies on social behavior indicate that individuals, particularly younger generations, spend a considerable amount of time online, highlighting a trend of increasing digital reliance.

To address skin longevity in the digital age, one must understand which factors accelerate the skin aging process in connection with a digital lifestyle. Digital consumption affects diverse daily activities, influencing our rhythms, sleep, biological processes, and ultimately our appearance and mental state. With sleep being our key resource to recharge and regenerate our whole system, studies have indicated that even the presence of screens in the room and more screentime are associated with shorter sleep durations and insufficient rest.

Our eyes are directly affected when our lifestyle involves the prolonged consumption of digital content. The excessive use of digital devices leads to reduced blink frequency and incomplete blinking, which exacerbates ocular surface dryness and discomfort. It is also evident that this recurring digital eye strain extends beyond the eye area and affects the sensitive and thin skin around our eyes. Increased rubbing and strained, tired eyes lead to a feeling of exhaustion and unconscious general malaise in many people. In many cases this can result in an increased inflammatory environment in the eye area, which spreads to surrounding areas. This can cause structural changes in the skin, including thinning and loss of elasticity.

Repeated patterns of facial expressions and distortions caused by unconscious facial tension due to prolonged screen use become etched into the face over time. As a result, the formation of wrinkles, dryness lines, loss of firmness, and reduced tightness are the visual expression of how we treat our face day after day. Increased screen use goes hand in hand with reduced physical activity, which can further accelerate aging, inflammatory mechanisms, and mental imbalance.

Since these new patterns of behavior are firmly anchored in our social lives and consciously avoiding them is only possible to a limited extent, if at all, most consumers need to understand how best to support the skin and thus the human in front of the screen. The focus is on a new kind of digital resilience that helps consumers manage their time independently, integrate active off-times into their day, and understand and maintain the condition of their skin, regardless of their daily behavior patterns.

SkinCharge CLR™ (INCI: Hydrolyzed Vicia Faba Seed Protein) was developed as an active ingredient for people who inevitably spend a large part of their daily lives in front of a screen. Obtained from a careful extraction and hydrolysis of the beans of Vicia faba, studies with SkinCharge CLR™ on consumer groups of all ages, all of whom with elevated daily screentime show multiple important benefits. Anti-aging parameters starting from the eyes and radiating across the entire face are brought into real life and the present moment under the light of digital longevity. SkinCharge CLR™ showed to reduce skin aging features of people with elevated screentime to a level of people who have low daily screentime.

Efficacy

Ex vivo studies for dermal integrity

Increase of essential dermal compounds

The above studies were performed in 2-dimensional in vitro experiments with primary fibroblasts. To obtain more information on the real-life effectiveness of SkinCharge CLR™, further studies were performed on human skin explants where SkinCharge CLR™ was applied topically.

Method:

Human skin explants were transferred into a 6-well plate, and 3.7 ml culture solution was added to each well for further culture at 37 ℃ at 5% CO₂, where the culture solution was changed every day for 2 days. After these 2 days the skin explants were irradiated with 30 J/cm² UVA and 50 mJ/cm² UVB. Then the cell culture medium was refreshed, after which SkinCharge CLR™ (3%) was applied topically on the skin explant. Subsequently the skin explants were incubated for 24 hours at 37 °C and 5% CO₂. The above-described cycle of irradiation, refreshing of the culture medium, and the topical application of SkinCharge CLR™ was performed a total of 5 times. Then the skin explants were further treated topically with SkinCharge CLR™ for another 3 days, where it was applied on the skin explants every day. Afterwards, the skin explants were taken for detection and fixed with 4% paraformaldehyde. After 24 hours of fixation, immunofluorescence detection was performed and pictures were taken under a microscope, with images being collected and analyzed. GraphPad Prism software was used to analyze the data, and the result was expressed as Mean ± SD. The comparisons between groups were performed using t-test statistical analysis.

Results:

It could be shown that the topical treatment of human skin explants with SkinCharge CLR™ is associated with a clearly higher presence of fibulin-5, fibrillin-1, elastin, collagen I, collagen III and collagen XVII (see figure 1). These results convincingly show that the treatment of skin with SkinCharge CLR™ indeed empowers the skin to produce dermal compounds which are indispensable for the maintenance of skin firmness and elasticity.

Clinical studies with a focus on volunteers with elevated exposures to screens

“Eye age” is a parameter generated by Haut.AI and represents a numerical age estimate produced by a convolutional neural‑network model that looks only at the ocular region in photographs. It is trained to predict chronological age from cropped patches of the area around the eyes, where lines, wrinkles, pigmentation changes and micro‑texture provide a strong aging signal. “

People with a high screentime lifestyle (8+ hours/day) show a significantly higher eye age. These people treated their skin with placebo or verum (containing 3% SkinCharge CLR™) for 3 months. Skin treatment with 3% SkinCharge CLR™ led to a significant reduction of eye age and compensates largely for the extensive exposure to screens (see figure 2). Based on data obtained with 30 volunteers.

Screentime and digital aging

The high amount of daily screentime leaves its mark on our faces. Facial expressions, tension and stiffness can affect the formation of wrinkles all over the face. This is particularly true when facial expressions are continuously influenced. 3% SkinCharge CLR™ has a strong anti-aging effect for digital resilience by reducing fine lines on the cheeks, reducing crow’s feet wrinkles and eye bags whilst enhancing skin’s elasticity and firmness.

Method:

The use of different methods of measurement is essential for providing a 360°-view on the effectiveness of an active ingredient. Therefore, in the presented studies, different technologies as well as human assessments were performed. Cheeks’ fine lines were determined with Haut.AI. Crow’s feet wrinkles were determined with AEVA-HE, eyebags and skin elasticity with clinical expert evaluation, and skin firmness by self-evaluation. Parameters were determined on skin of volunteers with increased screentime.

Results:

The measurable improvement in skin texture, wrinkling, elasticity and firmness is clearly evident among the test subjects (see figures 3). This makes SkinCharge CLR™ a fundamental basis for supporting the skin in every phase of life, as nowadays increased exposure to screens often occurs regardless of age.

Conclusion

Modern lifestyles include an excessive amount of screentime. In fact, the number of hours the average person spends behind a digital screen is higher than the combined hours we eat and sleep. The implications of this behavior are abundant. Digital eye strain where the eye area can dry out and become inflamed is a common phenomenon. Other consequences of high screentime include the reduced quality of sleep. It is not surprising that high screentime users show an accelerated skin aging phenotype, which the modern consumer is increasingly aware of.

SkinCharge CLR™ was developed to provide important support for the facial skin of the high screentime user. In numerous in vitro (not shown), ex vivo, and in vivo studies it could be shown that SkinCharge CLR™ enables the skin to compensate for the accelerated aging processes taking place in the skin of people who spend a large number of hours behind a digital screen every day.