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groups of ingredients in moisturizing cream. First, there are powerful chemicals, like alpha hydroxy acids, high levels of vitamin C, or molecular variations on the theme of vitamin A. These have genuinely been shown to make your skin seem more youthful, but they are only effective at such high concentrations, or high acidity levels, that the creams cause irritation, stinging, burning, and redness. They were the great white hope in the 1990s, but now they’ve all had to be massively watered down by law, unless on prescription. No free lunch, and no effects without side effects, as usual.
    Companies still name them on the label, wallowing in the glory of their efficacy at higher potencies, because you don’t have to give the doses of your ingredients, only their ranked order. But these chemicals are usually in your cream at talismanic concentrations, for show only. The claims made on the various bottles and tubes are from the halcyon days of effective and high-potency acidic creams, but that’s hard to tell, because they are usually based on privately funded and published studies, done by the industry, and rarely available in their complete published forms, as a proper academic paper should be, so that you can check the working. Of course, you have to forget that technical stuff; most of the “evidence” quoted in cream ads is from subjective reports, in which “seven out of ten people who received free pots of cream were very pleased with the results.” You don’t need anybody’s help spotting how useless that is as evidence.
    The second ingredient in almost all fancy creams is one that does kind of work: cooked and mashed-up vegetable protein (hydrolyzed X-microprotein nutricomplexes, Tenseur Peptidique Végétal, or whatever they’re calling them this month). These are long, soggy chains of amino acids, which swim around in the cream, languorously stretched out in the moistness of it all. When the cream dries on your face, these long, soggy chains contract and tighten; the slightly unpleasant taut sensation you get on your face when you wear these creams is from the protein chains contracting all over your skin, which temporarily shrinks your finer wrinkles. It is a fleeting but immediate payoff from using the expensive creams, but it wouldn’t help you choose between them, since almost all of them contain mashed-up protein chains.
    Finally, there is the huge list of esoteric ingredients, tossed in on a prayer, with suggestive language elegantly woven around them in a way that allows you to believe that all kinds of claims are being made.
    Classically, cosmetics companies will take highly theoretical, textbookish information about the way that cells work—the components at a molecular level or the behavior of cells in a glass dish—and then pretend it’s the same as the ultimate issue of whether something makes you look nice. “This molecular component,” they say, with a flourish, “is crucial for collagen formation.” And that will be perfectly true (along with many other amino acids which are used by your body to assemble protein in joints, skin, and everywhere else), but there is no reason to believe that anyone is deficient in it or that smearing it on your face will make any difference to your appearance. In general, you don’t absorb things very well through your skin, because its purpose is to be relatively impermeable. When you sit in a bath of baked beans for charity, you do not get fat, nor do you start farting.
    Despite this, on any trip to the pharmacy or department store beauty counter (I recommend it) you can find a phenomenal array of magic ingredients on the market. Valmont Cellular DNA Complex is made from “specially treated salmon roe DNA,” but it’s spectacularly unlikely that DNA—a very large molecule indeed—would be absorbed by your skin, or indeed be any use for the synthetic activity happening in it, even if it were. You’re probably not short of the building blocks of DNA