Retinol, Bakuchiol & Everything In Between

In this episode we go deep on the full vitamin A family, from prescription Retin-A all the way through to bakuchiol and whole plant ingredients. If you've been told you should be using retinol but aren't sure it's right for you, this one is for you.

What we cover:

• The full vitamin A spectrum, retinyl palmitate, retinol, retinaldehyde, HPR, and prescription tretinoin, what each form is doing in the skin and how they convert to their active form
• Why retinol causes peeling and sun sensitivity and what that means for your barrier
• The skin microbiome and how retinoids affect it
• Corneotherapy - the philosophy of skin health built around protecting the barrier, not disrupting it
• Bakuchiol - where it comes from, what the research actually shows, and how to read a label to know if you're buying the real thing
• Why a high percentage bakuchiol product is a red flag, not a selling point
• How bakuchiol and oil-soluble vitamin C work better together than retinol and vitamin C ever could
• What to do if you're pregnant, sensitive, or thinking about transitioning away from retinol
• Sea buckthorn, rosehip, and whole ingredients that feed the skin rather than direct it

Studies referenced:

• Dhaliwal et al. 2019 - Prospective, randomized, double-blind assessment of topical bakuchiol and retinol for facial photoageing. British Journal of Dermatology
• Draelos et al. 2020 - A Double-blind Evaluation of the Safety and Efficacy of a Bakuchiol Moisturizer. Journal of Drugs in Dermatology

Products mentioned:

• Immortal Serum - 1% bakuchiol, oil-soluble vitamin C, sea buckthorn, rosehip, turmeric, immortal flower, neroli, frankincense, red raspberry, jojoba — skinfrequency.co

Referenced episode:

• Vitamin C — the full breakdown:

Find Skin Frequency:

• skinfrequency.co

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

What happens when we stop trying to fix the skin and start listening to it? This is Skin Freaks, a podcast about looking closer and discovering what the beauty industry doesn't want you to know. I'm Summer, anesthetician, holistic facialist, and formulator with over 20 years experience. Here we'll pull back the curtain and explore what truly supports the skin. For practitioners and conscious consumers alike, this is a space for honest conversation and new ways of seeing. Let's get into it. This episode, we're going to talk about a question that comes up all the time. I'm told I should be using retinol, but my skin is sensitive. I don't want to peel. I like being out in the sun. Or I started using it and my skin got worse and I gave up. Or I'm seeing Bercuchiol everywhere and I don't know if this is worth it or just marketing. So those questions are what we're going to talk about in this episode: the full vitamin A family and what each form is doing, how it works with the skin, and what the alternatives look like. So you can make a decision that suits your skin and your life. Vitamin A is one of the most researched ingredients in skincare, and it's also misunderstood because there are so many forms of it, and they're not all doing the same thing. It's a fat-soluble vitamin. That means the body stores it rather than flushes it. You get it through foods like liver, eggs, dairy, and from plant sources rich in beta-carotene like carrots, sweet potatoes, and pumpkin, which the body then converts into vitamin A. But what we're talking about today is topical vitamin A applied directly to the skin. Skin cells have receptors specifically designed to receive vitamin A signals. When vitamin A in its active form reaches those receptors, it sends instructions to the cell. Produce more collagen, turn over faster, regulate pigment production. It influences multiple processes at once, which is why it has such a strong reputation as an anti-aging ingredient. Not all forms of vitamin A work the same way once they're on the skin. It has to convert into its active form first, retinoic acid. That's what binds to the receptors and does the work. And the further away that you're applying it from retinoic acid, the more steps that conversion takes. Think of it as a journey. Prescription tretinoin or retin A is already at the destination. No conversion is needed. It has immediate activity. That's why it works so fast and why it can feel like a lot for the skin to handle. The next form is retinol. That's what most people are using when they buy an over-the-counter anti-aging serum. Retinol needs two conversion steps to get there: retinol to retinaldehyde, retinaldehyde to retinoic acid. Each step requires specific enzymes and loses some potency along the way. So what you're getting is a portion of what you've applied to the skin processed through the skin's own conversion system. Go one step further back and you have retinol palmitate or retinal esters, which needs three conversion steps. They are the least likely to cause a reaction, but also the slowest. And this is what you'll find in a lot of everyday moisturizers. Understanding what each form of vitamin A is doing to the skin also means understanding what it's doing to the microbiome. The microorganism living on the surface of your skin plays a direct role in how your barrier functions, how it ages, and how it responds to what you put on it. There's a skincare philosophy called corneotherapy that is built entirely around this idea. It was developed by the same dermatologist who co-invented retinol. He spent decades studying what aggressive intervention does to the stratum corneum, the outermost layer of the skin, and what he found shifted how he thought about skin health completely. It's kind of interesting that the person who gave the world prescription tretinoin later built an entire philosophy around not disrupting the skin. Corneotherapy was the work he considered his life's final contribution. For a long time, the stratum corneum was considered dead tissue, just the outermost layer, inert and waiting to be shed. It wasn't taken as a functional part of the skin. But what his research showed is that it's anything but dead. The stratum corneum is biologically active. It's consistently sending signals down to the living layers of skin underneath it, influencing how the skin regenerates, how it responds to the environment, and manages inflammation. So it's not a wall of dead skin cells, it's more like a messenger. And what you do to it really matters. When you disrupt it, you don't just affect the surface, you change the conversation happening to the underlying layers. And that is the core philosophy behind corneotherapy. Whenever you see inflammation in the skin, regardless of the cause, the stratum corneum is compromised. Repair the barrier, and the underlying tissues no longer have to react as if there is danger in the environment, and then the inflammation can settle. Which brings us back to retinol. Retinol is effective. The data is clear on that. But the way it works is by accelerating the shedding of surface skin cells, which breaks down the junctions between those cells, and those junctions are what holds the barrier together. When they're disrupted, the skin becomes more permeable and reactive. That rawness and sensitivity in the early phases of retinol affects the microbiome directly. Beneficial bacteria lose their balance, and the right conditions for inflammation increase. The barrier and the microbiome are deeply connected. What happens to one happens to the other. For people using retinol from a compromised place like rosacea, eczema, and sensitive skin, it can create a loop that is very hard to exit. Corneotherapy asks a simple question: why put the skin through prolonged disruption when gentle alternatives exist that deliver comparable results? And that leads us directly to Bercuchiol. Bercuchiol is a plant compound from the seeds and leaves of the Babchi plant. Before the skincare industry got hold of it, Bercuchiol was already centuries deep in aerobatic and traditional Chinese medicine used for its skin healing and anti-inflammatory properties. If you compared the Bercutiol extract molecule to a retinol molecule, they look nothing alike, completely different structures, no chemical resemblance, and yet when researchers did gene expression profiling, mapping which genes get switched on when bercutiol is applied to skin cells, bercutiol was activating the same genes as retinol, the same collagen-producing pathways, the same cell turnover signals, the same renewal processes, two structurally unrelated molecules arriving at the same destination by entirely different roads. And this is what gave Bercuchiol genuine scientific credibility. The study that put Bercuchiol on the map was a randomized double-blind trial published in the British Journal of Dermatology, where 44 applicants applied either 0.5% bercucciol twice a day or 0.5% retinol once a day for 12 weeks. Both groups saw a significant reduction in wrinkles in hyperpigmentation. The retinol users reported significantly more scaling and stinging, and bercucciol got there without the disruption. The hyperpigmentation results are worth mentioning. 59% of the Bercutiol group saw an improvement compared to 44% in the retinol group. On that specific measure, bercutiol actually outperformed retinol. A separate peer-reviewed study published in the Journal of Drugs and Dermatology in 2020 looked specifically at Bercutiol on sensitive skin, rosacea, eczema, and cosmetic intolerance, and found significant improvement in hydration and barrier functions with no signs of irritation. For the people most likely to struggle with retinol, percutiol delivered without the cost. Bercuchiol also brings high antioxidant activity that retinol doesn't match. Since that study was published, Bercutiol has been one of the most talked-about ingredients in skincare. Products and serums with bercutiol are everywhere. And that's where it gets interesting because not all of them are using the same thing. There's a real difference between what is used in that research and what is in a lot of the products on the market. The bercuti oil used in the clinical studies is a pure isolated extract. The concentration is controlled and consistent, and that's what produces those results. Babchi oil is different. It comes from the same plant, but rather than an isolated extract, it's the whole oil pressed from seeds. It does contain bercutial at a concentration that varies from batch to batch and is significantly lower in bercutiol than the pure extract. The well-researched range for a bercutial product is 0.5 to 1%. The study that compared it to retinal use used 0.5%. At that level, it's already an active and meaningful dose, and 1% is considered strong. So when you see a product at 2%, 5%, 7%, 10%, it's most likely the whole babchi oil rather than the pure extract. And that's not necessarily harmful, but it's a different ingredient delivering a different experience. And the clinical results don't apply to it in the same way. More is not more with this ingredient. And when you're reading a label, look for the word percucciol and not babci oil and a percentage between 0.5 and 1%. Pregnancy is one of the most common times people are reassessing their skincare, and retinol is usually the first ingredient that comes up. During pregnancy, retinols should be avoided across the board from prescription strengths all the way down to the over-the-counter retinol. And it's also worth knowing that retinol can show up in a lot of everyday products that don't overtly advertise it. It can be listed as an ingredient without being featured on the front of the package, particularly in anti-aging and firming products. So somebody might stop using their retinal serum during pregnancy without realizing they're still getting retinal exposure through other products in their routine. So it's always good to check the full ingredient list in everything that you're using, especially during pregnancy. Bruchucial is what a lot of practitioners will recommend instead. It's not a retinoid and it doesn't carry the same cautions. And it has a very strong safety profile. It hasn't been studied extensively in pregnancy population, as most ingredients aren't, but there aren't any known risks. With everything during pregnancy, just check in with yourself and whoever is supporting you and do what feels the best for you. The sun is another consideration with retinol, as they are increasing the cell turnover rate and it can thin the outer layer of the skin. And that's what makes it more vulnerable to UV damage. That's why retinoids are recommended for nighttime use and why SPF every single day is pretty much a non-negotiable when you're using them. Bercutial, on the other hand, is also stimulating cell turnover. But because it's doing it in a way that isn't disrupting the barrier, it doesn't leave the skin vulnerable to UV. It's photostable and it doesn't increase sun sensitivity. So you can use it in the morning or the night without adjusting anything around it. It can be easy to assume that if the skin isn't peeling, nothing is happening, and Bercuccial changes that idea. The cell renewal is there and the collagen stimulation is happening, the pigmentation pathways are being addressed, but without the stress response on the surface. So you're getting all the benefits without the disruption. Vitamin A doesn't only exist in these isolated forms. There are also whole plant ingredients that are naturally rich in vitamin A and can be used in skincare. Sea buckthorn is one of the most nutrient-dense skin ingredients, and the berries are rich in beta-carotene, that plant form of vitamin A. And that deep orange color is your signal. It has a fatty acid profile, which makes it really unique. It is the only plant source that contains omegas 3, 6, 7, and 9 fatty acids simultaneously. Omega-7 is particularly compatible with the skin and plays a role in barrier support and cell regeneration. Topically, the beta-carotene functions primarily as an antioxidant rather than delivering direct retinoic acid activity. So it's not a direct replacement for retinol, but in terms of barrier support and antioxidant-rich ingredients, it's pretty extraordinary. Rose hip oil naturally contains transretinoic acid along with essential fatty acids and antioxidants. It has a long history of use in regenerating the skin, improving textures, scars, and photoaging. But the quality really matters here, so you want to look for a cold-pressed, properly sourced organic row tip. These are ingredients that feed the skin rather than direct it, but they combine beautifully with actives like percucciol and vitamin C. Traditional vitamin C and retinol are two of the most recommended ingredients in skincare, and yet they don't work well together. They operate at different pH levels, and combining them increases sensitivity and reduces how well each one performs. So most people end up micromanaging them into separate steps: vitamin C in the morning, retinol at night, and careful not to overlap. Bercutiol changes that entirely. Paired with an oil-soluble vitamin C, the two support each other. Bercuchial creates a more stable environment for the vitamin C to work in, and both address collagen, pigmentation, and oxidative stress at the same time. No sensitivity, no separate steps, and no micromanaging. Just two of the most effective actives in one step. And that's what I built a mortal serum around. It has 1% percutiol, oil soluble vitamin C combined with sea buck thorn, rose hip, turmeric, immortel, neuroli, frankincense, red raspberry, and jojoba. It's effective, gentle, and so nourishing all in one step. And if you missed it, we did a full episode all about vitamin C. So if you want to learn more about that, I will link it in the show notes. What actually makes sense for you right now? If you're currently using a retinol and tolerating it well, adding barrier support will improve the results. So adding in an oil cleanser and nourishing balms to protect and seal the products around your actives are gonna matter as much as the actives themselves. If you're thinking about transitioning from a retinol to percutiol, you can simply swap one for the other and just give it a bit of time to let your skin and your barrier recalibrate and adjust. You might find that the skin settles quite quickly without a disruption phase. If your skin is sensitive, reactive, or compromised, I would skip the actives right now and just focus on rebuilding that barrier first with a gentle oil cleansing, a nice nourishing balm, and whole supportive ingredients. Once the skin feels settled, you can slowly introduce an active. And doing it this way, it will respond completely different and from a place of strength than it would from a compromised starting point. The skincare culture has become very good at framing disruption as progress. The peeling means this is working, the burn means it's doing something. But skin that's reacting and inflamed is skin under stress. And stress is not the same as improvement. Corneotherapy has been saying that for decades. The vitamin A family gives us some of the best studies ingredients in skincare. And alongside it, there are now plant-derived ingredients that activate the same biological pathways without putting the skin through the same process to get there. I hope this episode leaves you feeling more informed, knowing what these ingredients are doing and what they are asking of your skin's ecosystem, and what questions are worth asking before you reach for something that promises fast results. The gentler path is not the lesser path. Skin care that works with your biology tends to be the kind that lasts a lifetime. Next time, we'll talk all about your skin and the sun, from sunscreen to UV and everything in between. Thanks for tuning in. Skinfreaks is brought to you by Skin Frequency. Formulas built around what the skin actually needs and nothing it doesn't. If you've enjoyed this episode, I'd love it if you shared it with a friend and subscribed so you'll get notified when future episodes are released.