Why Your Skincare Stops Working After 30 Days

Before-and-after photos don't measure whether your skincare is working.

They measure what already happened — weeks ago, at a biological level you can't see in a mirror.

Dr. Maria Feliva, Co-Founder & CEO of CheckGen, joins Jennifer Cookson on Demystifying Cosmetics to break down molecular-level skin testing,

Why the industry's standard measurement tools miss what actually matters, and what retinol is doing to your skin cells in the first 30 days.

What you will learn in this episode:

— Why before-and-after photos are the wrong standard for measuring

skincare results

— How long skincare products actually take to work on a molecular level

— What retinol does to your skin cells in the first 30 days —

and why do results plateau after that

— Why UV-damaged skin responds less to any skincare product

— How over-layering products creates the sensitive skin you didn't have

— What the industry currently accepts as clinical testing — and

why it's not enough

— Whether "anti-aging" will still exist as a category in 5 years

Dr. Maria Feliva is Co-Founder and CEO of CheckGen, a molecular skin testing company working with skincare brands to evaluate product efficacy at a biological level. Based in Australia, CheckGen works

with international brands.

Learn more at https://www.checkgen.com.au/

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Takeaways:

- What you see in a mirror is the output of biological changes that started 2-3 weeks earlier — the skin response happens long before it's visible

- Molecular changes from retinol begin within 30 days — after that the skin acclimatises and plateaus; this cannot be measured in

before-and-after photos

- Inflammatory markers are among the first proteins to shift with an

effective product — inflammation doesn't have to be visible to be present

- UV-damaged skin is in defence mode — it cannot use a topical product efficiently while managing excess UV stress

- Over-layering products stresses the skin barrier and can create sensitivity in skin that was previously not sensitive

- Customer surveys in industry testing are frequently guided — the questions are framed in a way that reduces the chance of a negative response

- Synergy between compounds in a formula can produce completely different cellular responses than any single active tested in

isolation