The £19 cream that smoothes away scars
Can a £19 treatment really reduce unsightly scar tissue? Victoria Lambert invited a cancer survivor to try it out – with impressive results
When doctors found a skin cancer on her face last summer, Sharon Holmes was naturally concerned. “My surgeon had to make an incision from just underneath my eye socket on the left side to the corner of my mouth to remove it,” says Holmes, 62, who lives with her husband, Steve, a 63-yearold accountant, in Hitchin, where she works for the Hertfordshire Fire and Rescue Service.
“I needed 11 stitches,” she says. “But, at the time, I remember thinking it was better to have a visible scar on my face than cancer.”
In the end, though, Holmes has ended up with neither – thanks, first, to expert work by her surgeon, who was able to remove the skin cancer successfully without her needing any more treatment.
But Holmes’s scar has gone, too, after she began using a new cream called Solution For Scars, the first topical cream to undergo goldstandard double-blind randomised controlled trials to establish its efficacy. The trial found evidence that the cream – designed to be used from the outset, as wounds heal – reduced redness, inflammation and thickness in human skin scarring.
The interest in scar removal or improvement is growing rapidly. According to a report on digitaljournal.com, the global market for treatment is expected to reach about £11.5billion by the end of 2022.
The report speculates that this is due in part to our enthusiasm for aesthetic work – the influence of the selfie generation, perhaps. But scarring can cause real emotional trauma, too. A 2010 review by the University of Pennsylvania found that scarring, especially after skin cancer surgery like Holmes’s, can profoundly affect psychosocial functioning.
And any scars can be difficult to treat, especially old or established wounds, or those that have become keloid – grown larger and lumpier than the original wound itself.
Still, all have an key evolutionary purpose: to prevent infection.
“In the womb, we heal by regeneration,” explains Douglas Mcgeorge, a Cheshire-based consultant plastic surgeon, “which leaves no scar. Just before birth, that healing process changes to an inflammatory one. This has the advantage of being quicker, to lessen the risk of infection, but it leaves a mark on the skin – a scar. If that inflammatory process doesn’t settle, scars become symptomatic and can thicken up.”
With time, most scars fade and flatten, though few disappear completely. According to the NHS, the process can take up to two years.
Yet when scarring is unsightly, uncomfortable or restrictive
– or is causing emotional distress – there are ways to reduce its visibility, including topical silicone gel, pressure dressings, steroids, surgery and camouflage make-up. Favourite over-the-counter therapies range from Bio-oil to herbal remedies. These work by keeping moisture in the scar, making it more pliable, but have no active ingredients and are not absorbed. However, none of these methods has attempted to tackle the root cause of scarring.
“To treat scars,” says Mcgeorge, “we need to modulate or control the inflammatory response, which will reduce the redness and thickness in the wounded area.”
Mcgeorge is part of a British team that includes wound healing expert Dr Ardeshir Bayat from the University of Manchester, who developed Solution For Scars, the cream that helped Sharon Holmes. “We wanted to find something that worked at a cellular level,” he says, “and knew there was evidence that some extracts from green tea were able to reduce inflammation due to their antioxidant content.
“Using green tea extract as the active ingredient, we created a topical cream, which has now been trialled and shown to reduce some scar thickness by up to 40per cent. We’re expecting the research to be published in medical journals shortly.”
Mcgeorge adds: “We already know that the cream can be used to calm down bites and acne and we’re currently looking to see if it can be used pre-operatively to prevent scarring. There is good evidence that priming skin can improve scarring.”
His team is not the only one looking for new ways to influence the way scars develop. In a University of Pennsylvania study published last year, researchers reported that scar tissue looked different from normal skin as it contained no fat cells. If skin scar cells can be converted into fat cells, wounds could be prompted to heal without leaving scars.
South Korean scientists are working on a new drug, codenamed OLX101, which switches off a gene known to be involved in scar-tissue formation. In a UK trial about to begin in Leeds, 44 people who have hypertrophic scars are being injected with different doses of the new drug to see its effect. The results of the study are due by summer 2019.
Other work looking into drug
‘After a month, you could hardly see it. I struggle to remember which side it’s on now’
treatments based on growth factors is in early-stage human clinical trials.
But what can you do if a scar is already established? Dr Jonquille Chantrey, a plastic surgeon and expert in aesthetic medicine, says there are a lot of non-surgical methods to improve appearance, including using topical antioxidants and retinol to increase cell turnover, which can help to improve fading.
“I also recommend microneedling using a Dermapen,” she says, “as this causes lots of small injuries into the scar and encourages more collagen, which plumps out the scar tissue. You can use radiofrequency to stimulate further collagen production and make scars shrink as well. And chemical peels can break down deeper layers of skin.”
Scars can also be revised surgically with the old scar cut out and a new, hopefully more minimal one created. “But you are swapping one scar for another,” warns Dr Chantrey.
For Sharon Holmes, the healing has been remarkably straightforward. “My scar looked angry to start with, but I rubbed the cream in three or four times a day, for a minute at a time.
“After a month, it was incredible: you could hardly see it. Six weeks later, my daughter Francesca couldn’t even see it. Now I struggle to remember which side it’s on.”