Matrixyl® is the trademark name for palmitoyl pentapeptide-3.Palmitoyl Pentapeptide stimulates collagen production in the skin and is found in the latest production of anti-wrinkle skin care products.
Collagen production reduces with age and leads to skin that lacks elasticity and therefore contains more wrinkles.Matrixyl® was discovered when researchers combined two fields of study. Namely:
- ways to accelerate healing properties of the skin, and
- what causes wrinkles.
The skin is primarily repaired by activity of fibroblasts – or tiny skin cells that help form new skin tissue and also manufacture collagen. Collagen is an important if not critical component of connecting new cells together.
The study essentially found that fibroblasts acted old as we grew older, and that wrinkles are essentially nothing more than the depletion of collagen in the production of new cell tissue.
The light bulb moment for scientists was establishing that fibroblasts never lost their healing capacity completely, but rather were simply acting old. Our capacity to heal slows down when we get older, but in many situations if not most, damaged skin does repair itself (obviously not as efficiently as our youthful days in the playground when a scrape and scratch were barely noticed after a couple of days).
The epiphany was in the discovery that by isolating fibroblast cells from aged tissue, and giving them a “jump start,” the fibroblast cells were able to start producing collagen.
The jumper leads to kick start this process was branded Matrixyl® in 1999.
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