Hooked on hydrogen
It’s in the latest creams, health waters and even facials. So is this the year we’ll all get...
ADMITTEDlY, when I was told about the hydrogen facial, I heaved a sigh. Another new miracle ingredient? Really?
And one that has been under our noses for ever, which may prove to be the key not just to better skin, but to greater health and possibly longer life?
After all, a facial is just a facial, and this facial sounded decent enough, and neither painful nor challenging, but nothing in it sounded especially miraculous.
There’s a deep-cleansing component to it, some massage and a spell under an lED light lamp — nothing particularly radical, even if it is done with ‘hydrogen water’. After all, isn’t all water hydrogenated? H2O and all that? Hmm.
But this facial isn’t just your run-of-the-mill pampering. It’s the latest offering at Dr Michael Prager’s new flagship clinic in South-West london. Dr Prager, for those who haven’t seen his name pop up over the past 20 years, is one of the luminaries of the tweakments industry. He is a Botox doctor of high renown and a dab hand at fillers. He also has a deep concern for skin health, and loves sharing his discoveries in this area.
So if he were championing this new hydrogen treatment, well, I felt compelled to find out more. A cursory Google is enough to tell me that it looks like hydrogen-based treatments will be one of the breakthrough beauty hits of the near future. Why, this time next year you may be using a hydrogen infused face cream and sipping a hydrogenated drink, as well as booking in for hydrogen facials.
Dr Prager is a big fan of hydrogen because it is a brilliant antioxidant which can defeat free radicals — the rogue molecules that provoke inflammation and accelerate ageing in the body’s cells. They are generated as a result of exposure to pollution, ultraviolet light, stress and the like.
Supply the body with enough antioxidants, the theory goes, and you can quell free radicals and reduce degenerative processes throughout the whole body, not just in ageing skin. So although the facial treatment offered at Dr Prager’s clinic is for your skin, the supposed benefits go far deeper.
‘Hydrogen is the smallest antioxidant there is,’ says Dr Prager. ‘It is basically two H atoms attached to a pair of electrons. As it is so small it can travel into all the body’s cells, into the brain, and into the mitochondria [the energy centre of each cell].’
Free radicals are harmful because they lack an electron, and set off a chain reaction of damage as they grab electrons from other molecules around them.
But hydrogen is what Dr Prager calls an electron donator. So when hydrogen encounters a free radical, it simply hands over one of its electrons, which stops the free radical mid-rampage.
‘Hydrogen can donate an electron and form a water molecule without becoming a free radical itself,’ explains Dr Prager. ‘That’s how antioxidants reduce cell damage and promote healing.’
SO far, so completely fascinating. Hydrogen treatments are popular in the Far East, and a brief nose around the scientific publications online reveals many trials seem to show hydrogen is ‘a promising therapeutic option for a variety of diseases’, from depression to stroke.
I say ‘ seem’ because none of these trials has been done on a large scale and there have been no secondary studies — yet.
If you’re looking to derive the maximum benefits from hydrogen, you can inhale it, which is what Dr Prager can be found doing during his lunch hours. He uses a thin tube that supplies it straight into the nostrils.
His interest in hydrogen was piqued during a visit to China, where he tried this inhalation for half an hour before a heavy night on the tiles involving a lot of beer and little sleep. When he felt fine in the morning, he marked it up to the hydrogen inhalation and began his research.
If you don’t fancy inhaling the stuff, you can drink hydrogenated water — water with hydrogen dissolved into it. It’s not fizzy and the hydrogen is tasteless.
Dr Prager has a hydrogen water maker in the clinic, and I find the water I’ve been swigging from the decanter on the front desk is infused with hydrogen, too. Wow. You don’t need to drink litres of it, either. ‘Most of the studies involve participants drinking a pint of hydrogen water a day,’ he says.
This leads us on to the facial, which starts with a deep cleansing of the skin using hydrogen water.
But it’s not just a wipe-down. It is performed by the Venus Glow, whose treatment head sucks up the skin it passes over with vacuum pressure, as a rotating spray directs two ultra-fine jets of water at the skin. It feels peculiar, as if some small, sucker footed creature is romping its way across my face.
But it’s not uncomfortable and, thanks to the suction effect, none of the water is escaping onto my face, even though it is being blasted into and sucked out of my pores.
The net result, says my treatment therapist Dana, is that my skin is being exfoliated, and all the pollution and debris that has accumulated in my pores is being grubbed out with every pass.
The massaging effect around every crevice of my nose and chin is improving the blood circulation within the skin. This in turn will release nutrients from the blood in the tiny capillaries near the surface into the skin tissues.
Each jet of water, at only 50-70 microns, is finer than a human hair, so the water is getting right into the pores. Normally, the hightech Venus Glow uses plain purified water, but hydrogen water calms inflammation and stops free radicals. Dana works steadily around my face for 15 minutes, to get it as clean as she can. My skin is in relatively good nick, she says (thank goodness) — with some people she can work away for an hour and find that there is still more debris to be extracted.
living in a polluted city doesn’t help. Dr Prager explains that what pollution does to the skin is possibly even more damaging than exposure to bright ultraviolet light on holiday.
After the cleansing comes some old-fashioned hands-on massage. Dana runs through a blissful range of techniques, knuckling and kneading and flickering her fingers over my face, to soften tight muscles and carry out a spot of lymphatic drainage.
Finally, she pops me under a light canopy for 20 minutes of exposure to combined red and near-infrared light, which stimulates collagen.
To finish, she pats my skin down with a few drops of antioxidantrich, pollution-shielding oil from Dr Prager’s own skincare range, and I’m good to go. My skin looks fresh, clear and glowing.
The clinic recommends having one of these facials every six to eight weeks. I can see that, quite apart from the extra antioxidant boost, they are great for a deep cleansing of the skin.
So am I a convert? You bet. Though really, we ought to be bathing in hydrogen water like they do in Japan, where it has been shown to reduce neck wrinkles. In the meantime, I’ve been Googling home-use hydrogen water-maker machines...