On expedition in the Swiss Alps, the team at Mibelle Biotech collected soil samples from land that was once covered by glaciers. These samples were later analyzed for microbial content and new (or rather quite old) bacteria were found. “Whole genome sequencing of an isolated strain led to the identification of lodobacter ssp., a psychrotolerant rod shapped gram-negative bacterium, which had been reawakened following many years lying dormant below the glacier ice layer,” explains the Mibelle one-sheet on the new Ice-Awake ingredient.
And it is with the help of this bacteria that Mibelle Biochemistry is producing IceAwake, an ingredient that helps rejuvenate skin that is showing the effects of age caused by prolonged periods of inadequate sleep.
The business of beauty rest
As the global wellness movement advances, brands in and beyond beauty are creating products meant to help consumers develop better sleep rituals and habits as well as both topical and ingestible treatments to help consumers’ skin make the most of overnight physiological repair cycles.
Moonlit Skincare, a beauty sleep brand that was recently featured on the Indie Beauty Profile column, “is dedicated to overnight skincare and sleep wellness. With pillowcases, silk eyemasks, nighttime formulas, beauty sleep teas, and more, we bring this crucial time for skin to recover, front and center,” explains Moonlit cofounder Stephanie Kim.
“Night time is an often overlooked pillar of health, even though it is the optimal time for your skin to regenerate,” notes Kim later in the profile. The corollary here is that “not sleeping enough, over a long period of time, accelerates skin aging,” as Fred Zülli, managing director of Mibelle Biochemistry, tells Cosmetics Design. To be more exact, Zülli explains that long periods of inadequate sleep disrupt normal protein folding.
Beauty from the Ice Age
So now, just as there are skin care ingredients to guard against and repair the oxidative stress of UV light, blue light, pollution particulates, etc., there is IceAwake to mitigates the damage that long-term insufficient sleep does to the skin.
Inadequate sleep, Zülli tells Cosmetics Design, down regulates the molecular chaperone BiP. IceAwake corrects for that down regulation, which disrupts normal protein folding. In 2 separate clinical tests (one with tired-looking Swiss people, the other with over-worked Korean people), Mibelle found that IceAwake upregulated BiP 100%. “This indicated that protein folding can be carried out more efficiently despite aging,” according to the company’s one-sheet. Effectively says Zülli, after the clinicals, the people involved in the tests had an “improvement in wrinkles and looked younger.”
At this week’s in-cosmetics North America tradeshow, Mibelle Biochemistry can be found at booth B40.
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Deanna Utroske, CosmeticsDesign.com Editor, covers beauty business news in the Americas region and publishes the weekly Indie Beauty Profile column, showcasing the inspiring work of entrepreneurs and innovative brands.
