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[music] Hello, I’m Dr. Neal Schultz
[pause]
and welcome to DermTV.
Peptides as ingredients in skin care products have become increasingly
important and popular, especially in products that treat lines and
wrinkles, and even more recently, hyper pigmentation and brown spots. Okay,
but what are peptides? Very simply, peptides are short or tiny proteins.
Proteins are made of long, long chains or strings or amino acids; let me
show you what I mean. This chain has about 35 or 40 links. Think of each of
these links as an amino acid, and most proteins are long, long chains of
amino acids - ten thousand, a hundred thousand, even a million links long.
What happens if it’s a very short protein? Just five links or maybe just
ten links? That’s what peptides are. And traditionally we’ve always thought
of peptides as just being the building blocks of big proteins; the
structural building blocks. But what we’ve learned recently is that
peptides can act as messengers. That means they go around the body and tell
cells either do something or don’t do something. So a peptide that goes to
a fibroblast can tell that fibroblast, “make more collagen,” and if it
makes more collagen, that’s how we help to fight lines and wrinkles. An
example of a peptide like that is palmitoyl pentapeptide, and palmitoyl
pentapeptide is found in both Strivectin and Regenerist. Besides those
peptides, we’ve also learned that there are peptides that can talk to
melanocytes which are the cells that make brown pigmentation and tell those
cells, stop making that pigmentation. That’s what helps to fight brown
spots and hyper pigmentation. So increasingly, there’s this vast array of
peptides in skin care products and they can help those skin care products
give you more beautiful skin and make your skin better.