Drug retinoids are some of the most powerful ingredients in skincare. So why would anyone use cosmetic retinoids? And are compounded drug retinoids the perfect middle ground between them? (No.)
I break down drug, cosmetic, and compounded drug retinoids, which one you should use, and bust a whole bunch of retinoid myths along the way.
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0:00 What are retinoids?
1:53 Benefits of drugs
8:23 Benefits of cosmetics
12:24 Which one should you go for?
14:14 Compounded drug retinoids
Does retinol in skincare even work? https://youtu.be/e6Z5Vr7uSiA
Blog post with more info and full references here: https://labmuffin.com/drug-cosmetic-compounded-retinoid-which-use/
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🙋🏻 I’m Michelle, a chemistry PhD, cosmetic chemist and science educator, here to explain how beauty products work, debunk myths, and help you make smarter decisions about your skincare, hair and makeup!
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Does retinol in skincare even work? https://youtu.be/e6Z5Vr7uSiA
How to get started on retinoids https://youtu.be/I2XV3nMyb9Y
Busting retinoid myths https://youtu.be/GLfiGlnwdhk
Ultimate Vitamin C Skincare Guide https://youtu.be/U68MTXuOG9k
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Blog post for this video with more info: https://labmuffin.com/drug-cosmetic-compounded-retinoid-which-use/
🧴 SKINCARE GUIDE 🧴 Find out more: https://labmuffin.com/skin
Retinoids are the gold standard skincare ingredients they are the next essential product right after sunscreen because they can help you with so many skin issues and there’s scientific evidence to back them up but it’s really tricky to work out which one you should use and
It really doesn’t help that there’s so much incorrect info out there but if you find the right one it can make such a huge difference to your skin my PhD is in medicinal chemistry and I’m a qualified cosmetic chemist so seeing all
These myths and traps that people fall for when it comes to retinoids that physically hurts me so in this video I’m going to break down drug versus cosmetic retinoids their pros and cons why drugs are a bit overrated cosmetics are really underrated and compounded retinoids are super overrated
Which one you should use and I’m going to bust a whole bunch of myths along the way if you don’t already know retinoids are skincare ingredients that work like vitamin A they work by attaching to retinoid receptors in your skin basically retinoids are like keys that fit into locks which are the receptors
And when that happens they will trigger an effect or rather they trigger a whole bunch of effects which is why retinoids are so great in skincare but also why they burn your freaking face off but we will get to that in a bit if you’re looking into skincare you probably have
Some sort of goal in mind and retinoids will probably help you towards that goal if you have acne then retinoids can stop pores from clogging up and turning into pimples if you want to even out pigment then retinoids can help normalize that pigment production process
If you want less wrinkles smoothed out scars and pores then retinoids will increase collagen that’s a protein that’s inside your dermis that makes it like a thicker mattress but not all retinoids work the same and not all products with the same retinoid will work the same either
Some retinoids are drugs and for these you will generally need a script but adapalene is available over the counter sometimes cosmetic retinoids like retinol are in regular skincare products my PhD was mostly medicinal chemistry and I studied pharmacology in undergrad so when I first started getting into skincare it just seemed like
Why would anyone use cosmetics when you could just use the drugs lots of doctors and scientists think this way and that’s because most scientists and doctors don’t get taught much about cosmetics and honestly not that much about drugs either or at least the finer details
But there are some really well-known benefits of drugs first off drug ingredients have demonstrated efficacy and that means they’ve gone through an approval process it is a bit like hazing except for molecules there are studies done using these on lots of people and then regulatory agencies with lots of experts checked through all
That data and decided there was enough evidence to say that these are effective so when a tube of adapalene says it’ll treat acne then it’s going to do that or at least the chance of it doing that is going to be higher there are other factors that can affect whether or not it
Will work for you specifically but the chances are as good as it gets there’s also a lot more independent research on drugs from lots of different research groups and less on cosmetics for… reasons check out my previous video for that
But the conclusion is it doesn’t mean that cosmetic retinoids don’t work we just have to do a lot more educated guesswork and that’s going to be in my next retinoid video plus I mean they gatekeep the stuff it’s so powerful they make you jump through hoops to get it
It just gives off a lot more like power vibes a less obvious but really really important upside is that the final formula of a drug is also tested for effectiveness now a lot of you are probably thinking about the percentage and you’re correct but if you
Watched some of my other videos before you’ll know it goes a lot further than just that you can’t just dump 0.05% tretinoin into some random moisturizer and expect it to work as well as this guy basically if you have a good drug base it needs to convince
That active ingredient to leave the product that you’ve just applied on your skin go into your skin and go deep enough to reach the retinoid receptors some ingredients will go into skin more easily because of their properties so they
Might be a bit smaller or they might have just the right balance of oil and water solubility but other ingredients need a bit more convincing from that formula the cool thing about drugs is that this formula here is pretty much the same one that worked in the scientific studies
And I think all this control and regulation over drug formulas is where one of the biggest myths in skincare comes from I see this from influencers and dermatologists and scientists and pharmacists all the time it’s the idea that percentage is everything that matters about skincare
A lot of people fall into this trap and it’s especially people who are used to giving out actual medications like doctors and pharmacists and that’s because for drugs you can usually assume that if the percentage of the active ingredient
Is the same then the generic is going to work the same as the brand name product but the only reason you can assume this is actually because of this regulation in the background regulators make brands demonstrate that their generic drug formula doesn’t just
Have the same percentage of active but that it actually works the same on skin this is something called bioequivalence and there’s a whole bunch of studies that generic drug makers need to run to show that their product is bioequivalent equivalent on the skin to the brand name one
If it doesn’t work the same and they still want to sell it then they have to go through a whole separate much more complex drug approval process so when it comes to drugs all this hard work is done by regulators and manufacturers in the background so you usually just need to check that
You’ve got the same active ingredient the same percentage and the same form but all of this regulatory gatekeeping just doesn’t really happen with cosmetic skincare you might have a badly formulated 1% retinol that just like sits on top of
Your skin and then you might have a really well formulated 0.2% retinol that actually gets more of that retinol down through your skin into the receptors but if you’re only looking at the percentage then you would end up picking the less effective product there’s also better stability regulation for drugs
Drugs and cosmetics are both usually tested for standard stability unless there something that’s gone really wrong so this is stuff like is it going lumpy or moldy too quickly but for drug retinoids the manufacturers actually need to make sure the active ingredient lasts in their specific formula and in that specific packaging
So if you follow the storage directions on the packaging and you should always read them and I totally didn’t read them for the first time when I was preparing for this video it should stay pretty close to 0.05 or 0.1% until the expiry date
But most of the time this doesn’t happen for cosmetics which is a problem because retinoids are pretty unstable they just fall apart all the time now some cosmetic brands do put in extra effort to make sure that their retinoid products are stable
And I will talk about those in my next cosmetic retinoid video but the thing is they don’t have to it’s perfectly legal for a brand to just dump 1% retinol into a random cream and then just sell that and it might be completely decomposed
By the time it gets to you and it’s both legal and actually pretty common there’s this research group that tested a whole bunch of retinoid products and a lot of the retinoids in these were half gone 6 months after opening them
And product quality quality in general is just better for drug products there’s just more of a guarantee that they contain what they say they contain now this is also legally required for cosmetics they should also have an accurate ingredients list but things slip through the cracks and they slip through less for drugs
There’s more controls over how drugs are manufactured drug labs have to be certified for good manufacturing practice I know that kind of sounds like I’m talking about like backyard drug labs but I’m not I’m talking about actual drug manufacturers so there are a whole bunch of examples of mix-ups that’s happened with cosmetics
For example the inkey list they got into trouble for having 3.4% salicylic acid in their 2% cleanser which is higher than the legal limit in the EU now this might seem like it’s some sort of bargain because you’re getting more of your active but I
Don’t think it was actually intentional because it was like above the legal limit it was illegal so it does kind of make you wonder if they’re messing that up what else are they messing up the FDA did a study in 2009 and they tested the retinoids in 29 cosmetics and
1/5th of them had the wrong retinoid or they had the wrong concentration the research group from earlier they also tested a whole bunch of freshly opened retinoid products and almost all of the ones that had a percentage on the label had a different
Percentage of retinoid inside and a bunch of them also just had the wrong retinoid inside and again this does happen with drug products too but there are just a lot more safeguards in place so all of this just makes it sound like drug retinoids are amazing and they are
To an extent but there also some downsides that aren’t really as obvious until you’ve been deep in both the drug and the cosmetic worlds and you’ve thought about this for way way too long the biggest pro in my opinion is that there is just so much more flexibility when it comes to
Cosmetic formulas which is like the flip side of all this strict drug regulation once a drug formula gets approved the brand can’t really change it very much without going through a new super expensive drug approval process and again it isn’t just about percentage or even what other
Moisturizing actives they have inside the formula so for example Altreno is 0.05% tretinoin inside a lotion base and that base also has sodium hyaluronate I don’t know why that word is so hard to say collagen and glycerin and that ends up being less irritating the manufacturer
Was already making 0.05% tretinoin in a gel base with the same moisturizing ingredients so to get this new lotion base approved they had to do two 12 week clinical trials that had over 1,600 people that is is a lot of money according to the average in
This study this would have been tens of millions also yes that is hyaluronic acid in the formula can we please stop fearmongering about how bad it is in skincare yes it can make some ingredients penetrate more because it is hydrating and that can
Lead to irritation but there is also evidence that some sizes will work as an anti-aging active we don’t give other anti-aging actives a hard time for being irritating sometimes and drug companies are intentionally putting it in formulas that they’re betting millions of dollars on to be less irritating
Anyway that is a rant for a different video as you’ve probably worked out the big reason we want flexibility in formulas is irritation it is a huge issue it’s the main reason people drop out of clinical trials for retinoids and why people just stop using them
There are lots of hacks for making them less irritating I did a video on this a while back but almost everyone who uses the stronger retinoids will end up applying a bit too much at some point and you end up like a red itchy peeling
Mess and it always happens right when you don’t want to have that happening like today when I was putting on makeup and there’s a whole bunch of evidence that you can change the irritation by changing the formula
A lot of these newer drug retinoid formulations have these sorts of features but they are in tons of cosmetic products but most of the time when you have a drug formula it is super basic and there’s another bonus in this whole vein of irritation and messing up your application
Anecdotally there is just a lot more leeway if you apply too much of a cosmetic retinoid you you aren’t just slapped with regret with all this like peeling and irritation and redness like you are for drug retinoids and this might actually be because of how cosmetic retinoids convert in skin
Most of them need to turn into tretinoin to work properly and a lot of people see this purely as a downside it means that they do tend to be weaker and less likely to work but it might actually help them be essentially self-limiting and time release versions of tretionin
These are the steps for most cosmetic retinoids turning into tretinoin these first two steps are reversible so this might look familiar if you know a bit about equilibrium and buffers in chemistry in theory if you apply too much of any of these top ones it can kind of overflow and
Turn into the other things and not tretinoin they might just turn into tretinoin a bit later but if you apply too much tretinoin there’s no pathway that goes back to the less potent versions because that is not a reversible process so there are just less systems in
Place for buffering any excess overflow and it ends up being a lot less forgiving there’s also availability most of the time it’s just a lot easier to get cosmetic products for most of these drug retinoid you need to go to a doctor and have them decide if you should get a script
There’s also a really limited number of drug formulas in some countries you can’t get all of the retinoids easily like tazarotene is really hard to get in Australia drug products also get discontinued all the time without having a good replacement and it’s a lot easier to buy cosmetic products from legit retailers overseas
So drug versus cosmetic retinoid which one should you go for I’m going to go through some of the very general things you might want to think about obviously I am a chemist not a medical doctor and I don’t know the specifics of your situation
If you’re not sure you should really book a consult with a cosmetic dermatologist first off strength and tolerance drug retinoids are generally stronger and most of them aren’t really formulated to reduce irritation so you do need to use them really carefully at
The start and even then most people are going to end up having some irritation so think about can your skin handle retinoids this isn’t the same for other irritating ingredients so for example my skin is really good at tolerating chemical peels so I thought
I would be fine just slapping on retinol I was not fine my skin just kind of leapt off my face so if you haven’t used retinoids before cosmetic ones are probably a better starting point there are also some genetics involved in retinoid irritation so if your
Relatives have used them before that might give you an indication some studies have also found that East Asian skin is less tolerant if your skin is sensitive in general a big part of retinoid irritation is to do with barrier disruption
So if your barrier isn’t really happy to begin with then you probably want to take it slow maybe start with a cosmetic retinoid availability and price this depends on where you are so if you have generic drug retinoids that can end up cheaper but that might also depend on pack size
Obviously you also need to factor in the cost of the doctor’s appointment if you’re going for the prescription ones and which doctors can actually prescribe retinoids in your region you can buy prescription retinoids from overseas pharmacies and some of
Them don’t really check if you have a script but I am really not a big fan of this option a lot of the time you don’t end up really covered by either country’s regulations so a lot of those advantages of drug retinoids are gone like guaranteed formula efficacy stability and that quality control
All right we need to talk about compounded drug retinoids and this is where you have a specially trained pharmacist they mix up a custom formulation from a doctor so for example something like this with tretinoin azelaic acid and niacinamide it’s what a lot of those telederm custom skincare companies are doing
Like apostrophe curology hers dermatica and this isn’t like a criticism of any of them specifically but it’s just a limitation of this whole system in general it might kind of seem like you’re getting the best of both worlds you’re getting drug and cosmetic
You’re getting a custom formula which has those drug actives you want at effective concentrations but if you think about all of these pros and cons that we’ve just been through you actually lose a lot of the advantages of both drugs and cosmetics
On the upside you do get the more effective drug retinoid as the active but because it’s a custom formula the formula efficacy and stability aren’t being tested compounding pharmacists are going to look for obvious clashes and then mix the ingredients into some sort of generic base but that is it
So the efficacy and stability is almost definitely going to end up worse than an off-the-shelf drug retinoid maybe even some cosmetic skincare products that have been properly tested the formula flexibility also isn’t that great you do get to combine actives but the compounding
Pharmacy might not necessarily have a huge range and it will depend on what your doctor gives you you usually also don’t get much choice for the base it’s a base that’s been optimized to work well for a bunch of different actives
It’s not really optimized to be for tretinoin or necessarily nice to use there are some telederm companies that have nicer bases they use but it’s still not really a guarantee in theory they could be optimizing their formulas and making them deliver better
And be more stable because they do tend to prescribe a whole bunch of formulas that are really similar but as far as I can tell none of them are actually doing that all of them seem to have some reviews saying that their brand new product has like scratchy crystals
In it and that is a pretty basic stability issue that shouldn’t be there for cosmetics their expiry dates are usually the default compounding 3 to 4 months versus 6 to 12 months for an off-the-shelf drug retinoid also 6 to 12 months or even longer for the good cosmetic retinoids
So I actually think a better option for most people would just be layering and off-the-shelf drug with a cosmetic skincare product that has the other actives you want it’s a lot less convenient for application you do have to squeeze out two products instead of
One but you can get good stability for the separate products and there is efficacy testing and stability testing for the drug and maybe also the cosmetic product the efficacy might drop a bit if you mix them but it is still better than no testing and
You can wait a bit in between layers to try to give it the best chance possible but it does really depend on your situation for some people it might end up better because you do get that doctor’s appointment wrapped up in there but I think just the formula part is just super overrated
So that is drug versus cosmetic retinoids we did it Joe remember you don’t have to choose just one or the other I personally will use both depending on how my skin is feeling now before you start slapping a retinoid on your face you’ll want to know how you’re
Meant to introduce them without your skin falling off I have a video on that and my ebook tells you how to get a skincare routine going next I’ll be talking about all the different drug retinoids then I’ll go into all the cosmetic retinoids
In the meantime you can check out my deep dive on vitamin C or just my skincare science playlist special shoutout to Sam one of my ex-students who is a pharmacist and pharmacy instructor for helping me out on the compounding stuff and Ruby for giving me feedback
You can check out the written version of this on my website which has a lot more info and references
