SKINCARE Doctors’ Orders

A healthy, youthful-looking complexion is no longer the sole domain of the big beauty brands. ZANETA CHENG and TAMA LUNG meet three medical professionals shaking up the skincare industry

In case you’ve forgotten, or perhaps weren’t aware, our skin is an organ. In fact, it’s the largest organ of our body, responsible for everything from temperature regulation and vitamin production to protection from UV radiation and other potentially damaging toxins, allergens and carcinogens. It’s also a vital barrier between our inner organs and the outside world, and a key indicator of our age, health and attractiveness.

Armed with this knowledge, as well as the expertise that comes through years of medical training, increasing numbers of doctors are entering the skincare market with painstakingly

developed product lines and often proprietary ingredients. Three such doctor-founded brands recently debuted in Hong Kong, hoping to tap into our obsession with effective, science-backed skincare that’s powered by Mother Nature.

It just so happens that all three brands hail from Germany, the latest hotbed of so-called clean beauty. The country’s reputation for high-tech engineering and sustainable living have made it the next in line after K-Beauty (Korea) and J-Beauty (Japan). Here we meet the latest champions of G-Beauty: Dr Barbara Sturm, Dr Augustinus Bader and Dr Timm Golueke.

DR BARBARA STURM

“Number one, I’m a woman. Two, I really care about my skin. Three, I’m not just in a white lab coat mixing creams; I’m also talking to my patients. And four, if something is not an obsession for me, I’m not doing it,” says Dr Barbara Sturm when asked what sets her namesake skincare brand apart. “There’s no motivation for me except for healing my own skin, looking in the mirror and thinking, ‘Perfect.’”

Sturm, who began her medical career as an orthopaedist, burst on to the beauty scene with the vampire facial. She developed the treatment, which uses a patient’s own platelet-rich plasma, after trying to resolve her own skin issues.

“I spent a fortune on products, and nothing helped,” she says. “I was like, stop it right here. I’ll do my own cream. I used proteins made from my white blood cells but also growth factors. I started using it and never went back to my facialist.”

Soon Sturm’s patients were asking for products too, “but I couldn’t recommend anything, so I had to come up with own.” With her orthopaedic background and scientific training, she focused her research on inflammation.

“Inflammation is what kills us. It’s what makes us sick, what makes us age, be red, be irritated. Inflammation takes down our tissue and really destroys our body in slow motion,” she says. “Diets can cause a lot of inflammation. Travel. Acid peels and retinol actually cause inflammation. Especially today, the air isn’t clear any more, food is getting worse and so on.”

But the worst culprit of all? “Bad skincare products,” she says. Sturm therefore set her sights on highly antiinflammatory ingredients and discovered the powerful regenerative effects of the Central European medicinal plant purslane. The vitamin- and mineral-rich herb is combined with other active ingredients such as skullcap, Vitamin E, shea butter and hyaluronic acid in hero products that include the Super Anti-Aging Serum, Enzyme Cleanser, Deep Hydrating Face Mask and the innovative Anti-Pollution and Sun Drops.

“Most anti-ageing systems are damaging your skin in order to make it grow. But the best things for anti-ageing are anti-inflammation, hydration, nutrition and telomerase activation. Your skin also has a lot of mechanisms to take care of itself and the skincare is just there to help,” Sturm says. “It’s a new approach. I don’t think anyone in the skincare industry would tell you the same thing.”

DR AUGUSTINUS BADER

“An Austrian doctor from the medieval period once said that if he could create fever, he could cure everything,” says Dr Augustinus Bader, the German scientist who has harnessed the power of inflammation and stem-cell rejuvenation to create The Cream, a cult product that’s caused a ruckus on the beauty scene in the past two years.

The product is a single cream to be applied without serum, on clean dry skin. It seems simple but the formula has its roots in burn scarring and transplant science from as far back as 1986, when Bader first travelled to Shanghai as a medical student to attend a conference on burn treatment, long before Bader had any contact with the skincare industry.

“These doctors, who were extremely advanced in the medicine of burns, were transplanting pig skin to people who were burned from head to toe and only had a bit of skin left on the soles of their feet,” Bader recalls. “Four weeks later the body rejected the pig skin, but this gave the patients’ skin enough time to expand on the body, so they survived these massive burns.

“This really inspired me. Maybe it was the first example in the world where one’s own stem cells were grown on the body, rather than what the rest of the world was doing where they grow cells outside the human body.”

Because of this, Bader went on to work at a transplant surgery where he was encouraged by his head of department to figure out ways to extend cell generation in an effort to multiply a body’s existing cells rather than rely on organ donation. “Your body is need-driven,” Bader explains. “It only activates its stem cells if there’s a need, so if I were to cut my hand, my body would know where the site of injury is immediately and direct signals to fix those wounds.

“Inflammation is seen as something extremely negative,” he adds. “Nobody wants it, but in reality it’s a signal that starts a repair process, where your body activates your immune system. People think that when we get older we have a shortage of stem cells, but in reality they sit inside you until they’re activated. So think of the cream as skin food concocted with the perfect ingredients in the perfect concentration for stem cells to work at their optimum.”

It was Bader’s decade-long research in burns that really brought the masses to the cream Bader’s eponymous brand produces today. “I had a small clinic where people would come in with problems on their skin – burns and such – and I’d try to fix it. I’d put on my cream and they’d get beautiful skin,” Bader says, showing images of diabetic wounds that healed using his wound cream as well as month-by-month snapshots of a 13-year-old burn victim whose skin returned to normal over the course of a year of treatment.

“I started to realise that people become happy when they use a skincare product. Beauty is something that can really give self-esteem. You know, medical doctors really don’t think this way, but I think from everyone I treated that it really gives them self-confidence.”

“Inflammation is seen as something extremely negative. But in reality it’s a signal that starts a repair process” — Dr Augustinus Bader

DR TIMM GOLUEKE

Named for one of its core ingredients, Osmunda regalis, Royal Fern is the brainchild of dermatologist Timm Golueke and research scientist Leonhard Zastrow. The nine-piece collection is based on the patented Royal Fern Complex, which blends extracts of the evergreen and sunlight-resistant fern with seeds from the Voacanga africana tree, wild rose blossoms, sea buckthorn and UV-reflecting mineral oxides.

“Fern is highly anti-inflammatory, highly antioxidative, and it inhibits the telomeres that cause more pigmentation,” explains Golueke, who first learned of the ingredient’s health benefits from a study published in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology. “It’s an all-in-one agent to fight all signs of ageing.”

Golueke was motivated to create skincare – and hair- and scalp-care – products after repeated requests from his patients. “This is how it starts. Then you think, should I do it? And you talk about it, you think about it. You can have the idea but it’s not easy to do it,” he says. “So we started looking at ingredients and then this study came out, and we started developing the complex. I didn’t know how complicated it is. It really takes four years to do everything from the testing to finding the packaging.”

Royal Fern – whose key products include the protective Phytoactive Anti-Aging Serum, concentrated Phytoactive Anti-Oxidative Ampoules and nutrient-rich Phytoactive Hydra-Firm Intense Mask – is produced in a small factory outside of Munich, and Golueke still relies on patients, friends and therapists to assist in research and development. And unlike most dermatologists, who specialise only in aesthetic treatments, Golueke says at least half his patients visit him for common skin issues such as acne, rashes, melasma and mole checks.

“This is where the line started, with so many questions. We’re all overwhelmed by duty-free shopping, social media, 50 beauty products being recommended to us by different channels every day,” he says, emphasising the importance of working with a dermatologist to really examine the products we’re applying to our skin and the treatments that are most appropriate.

In response to Dr Sturm’s claim that acids and peels make skin worse rather than better, Golueke says, “She’s not a dermatologist. Sometimes you have to peel. Or sometimes patients need to take Accutane, or do a monthly peel to prevent scarring. I think it’s a healthy mixture and, of course, overdoing anything is bad.

“You don’t always have to reinvent the egg, as we say in Germany. You don’t look good when you don’t look happy. So you shouldn’t be neurotic about everything. And if you think a cream isn’t good for you, just stop using it.”