5 Reasons to Include Vitamin C In Custom Skincare Formulations
Want to know what all the hype is about vitamin C?
It’s one of the most popular ingredients in the skincare industry today. Decades of research have proven it a remedy for a myriad of skincare concerns ranging from discoloration to anti-aging, and basically everything in between. In this article, we explain five reasons why you’d be remiss not to include it in your custom skincare formulations.
If you’re looking to grow your brand, one of the fastest and easiest ways is to build customer loyalty by offering products that are of course safe and sustainably sourced, but even more importantly, products that actually work. Vitamin C is an omnipotent ingredient packed with antioxidant and healing properties that can have quite dramatic – yet completely safe – effects on the skin. This makes it an ideal ingredient to center in your products to serve a multitude of concerns your customer base might have.
Use Vitamin C to address these five popular skin concerns:
1. Redness and irritation (eczema, psoriasis)
2. Dark undereye circles
3. Hyperpigmentation (dark spots, sun spots, acne scars)
4. Balancing moisture levels (overly oily or overly dry skin)
5. Uneven texture and tone
How it works
Vitamin C helps the skin retain moisture for perfectly balanced hydration and accelerates the body’s natural production of both collagen and elastin – two essential proteins that inform the skin’s texture and shape. Stimulating its growth by either topical application or dietary supplement causes a domino effect that can work wonders for preventative anti-aging.
Its antioxidant properties help the body radically repair and recover damaged skin cells, regardless of the cause. Damage to the skin may be due to UV exposure that has produced sun spots or hyperpigmentation, acne scarring, or the natural aging process (loss of collagen and elastin) that marks mature skin with uneven texture and/or loss of elasticity. The highly acidic healing properties of vitamin C make it a main driver in giving the skin a noticeably smoother, brighter, plumper effect. Research also suggests it may protect skin from the precancerous impacts of sun exposure.
How to incorporate it into your product line
There are a few things to note when creating custom formulations for vitamin C products.
Of all the different forms of vitamin C, pure ascorbic acid (or L-ascorbic acid on your ingredient label) is proven to be the most efficacious at penetrating the skin’s barrier. However, there are also other forms you can explore for a less-potent impact, including tetrahexyldecyl ascorbate, magnesium ascorbyl phosphate, and methylsilanol ascorbate. Serums are preferred for topical vitamin C products since they don’t include any other emollients (such as toners or creams) that might dilute its efficacy.
Vitamin C breaks down when it’s exposed to light and air, so you’ll want to work with your manufacturer on sourcing dark glass bottles for your primary packaging. For this reason, you should also advise on any secondary packaging and other marketing materials that it’s best used at nighttime when the sun isn’t a factor. If worn out in the sun during the day, the ingredient can have an opposite effect, and has the potential to actually worsen dark spots and hyperpigmentation. So be sure to let users know never to wear vitamin C in the daytime without protecting it with an SPF 50+ on top.
You can also choose the desired potency, anywhere from 5-20%. You may consider offering a few different options for customers shopping with different levels of sensitivity. A newbie to vitamin C would do best to start with a 5% product, and work their way up to 20% as needed.
Allure Labs has over thirty years of demonstrated history in guiding brands to create game changing vitamin C skincare. Ready to get started? Fill out a Product Request Form on our website today to put your vision into action.
This article is authored and approved by Sam Dhatt.