Evermore Aesthetics: beauty under repair

GHK-Cu and skin repair

Evermore is a lavish word to attach to a face. It suggests a finish that stays finished. Maintenance suits my temperament: the less glamorous business of making, clearing away and making again.

The copper peptide GHK-Cu gives that interest somewhere concrete to go. A review of tissue remodelling describes increased synthesis of collagen and elastin alongside matrix metalloproteinases and anti-proteases. Those last groups include enzymes that break down tissue's surrounding material and proteins that restrain that breakdown. There is a great deal happening beneath the agreeable word ‘repair’.

I like this untidy picture. An aesthetic ideal can look static; the biology described in these experiments is busy. That is an interpretation of the research, and the reason this archive begins with GHK-Cu.

Collagen production in culture

The early collagen experiment used human fibroblasts in culture. GHK-Cu increased collagen synthesis without changing the number of cells. That is a wonderfully specific result to start with: something changed in what the cells were making.

A face contains more complications than a culture dish. Still, I give that experiment real weight because its question was manageable and its answer precise. The collagen file follows this finding into the wider account of tissue remodelling.

The research files

The clinical material introduces a different kind of interest. A review reports increased procollagen synthesis in a share of treated subjects, while a skin-layer experiment follows copper entering and remaining in human skin outside the body. The measured substance, the setting and the outcome each change the story.

Particulars suit me. A cream result has its own texture; so does a hair trial testing a mixture. The files below follow those separate subjects far enough to make them interesting. The grand word in the site's name can wait while the smaller findings have their say.