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Our Serum delivers a 1-2 punch - both firming the skin with B-SILK PROTEIN and replenishing the skin with a potent dose of NMF ingredients.
You might have noticed that feeling of your skin right after you’ve cleansed. It is tight and squeaky clean but under a microscope you would see that your skin is now exposed and vulnerable. This is a crucial moment for your skin but a cinch to restore. Especially with our silk facial serum.
Here’s Why
In our research, it became clear that one of the most disruptive things we do to our skin and it’s barrier is to cleanse and exfoliate, which depletes its natural moisturizing components. Of course cleansing is essential to healthy skin to remove the bad – dirt, oil, and grease, but in doing so, you also deplete some of the good. Moreover, some dermatologists have concerns over the beating that our skin barrier is taking due to overuse of otherwise beneficial ingredients such as Retinoids and Exfoliating Acids. All of this suggests how important it is to replenish the barrier with essential components for supporting healthy, glowing skin.
One of the components that easily gets depleted from our skin’s barrier is called the Natural Moisturizing Factor (NMF). NMF is a cocktail of Amino Acids, Pyrrolidone Carboxylic Acid, Lactic Acid, Hyaluronic Acid, and more that the skin naturally creates to keep the stratum corneum and epidermis hydrated.
The concept of a replenishing serum is simple. It’s about rapidly replenishing your stratum corneum with beneficial components right after you cleanse and just before applying your moisturizer, which will help “lock” everything in. We found that Dr. Shari Marchbein said it best in the New York Times story, “If you frost a dry cake, the cake is still dry. If you frost a moist cake, it stays moist.” We completely agree.
What makes Eighteen B’s Firm + Replenish Serum the best serum for the job?
When we were developing our Firm + Replenish Serum, the serums we saw on the market delivered a potent dose of great actives. However, none of these also tackled the issue of replenishing the Natural Moisturizing Factor and essential Lipids, which our skin loses during cleansing.
Our Serum delivers a 1-2 punch – both firming the skin with B-SILK PROTEIN and replenishing the skin with a potent dose of NMF ingredients. That means the skin is in a better state to function normally, and isn’t using up precious biological resources to maintain a healthy state. A healthy barrier means healthy skin which leads to reduced lines, improves texture and skin is nourished and soft.
You are going to love the texture (it’s quite unique)
This product absorbs immediately and there is no greasiness or stickiness afterwards. It leaves your skin set and ready for moisturizer application. Fun Fact! It also plays well with others. The feedback we hear is that people love to layer their water-based treatments (i.e. brightening, resurfacing serums) under our Firm + Replenish Serum. Others like to layer their oils over our Firm + Replenish Serum.
We are also very excited to have achieved this unique texture in a clean way. Our Firm + Replenish Serum is EWG Verified, Leaping Bunny Certified, Vegan, and formulated without Silicones, Parabens, Mineral Oil, or Petrolatum.
Did we talk about the performance? It’s also clinically shown to be the real deal.
Why did we specifically call out “Firm” in the serum name? In a 12-week clinical trial, topical application of our silk facial serum (followed by application of a simple moisturizer) showed significant improvement in skin firmness compared to baseline (i.e. the start of the test) and a 2x improvement in firmness compared to a moisturizer only control (i.e. subjects only used a moisturizer without using our serum).
How is this possible? By protecting your skin barrier with silk facial serum, you’re paving the way for healthy skin, specifically the stratum corneum and the dermis. Skin firmness is linked to the collagen and elastic fiber network in the dermis. Net, the simple act of protecting your barrier can have a dramatic impact on the appearance, texture and health of your skin.
To further verify our clinical testing, we also ran a 100-person, third-party, 28-day blinded consumer panel study**, where beauty aficionados used the product both day and night. This is what we found and what some of the panelists had to say.
Panelists observing improvement in: | Day 7 | Day 28 |
Skin feels smoother to the touch | 84% | 91% |
Firms the appearance of skin | 71% | 81% |
Skin feel nourished | 88% | 93% |
Skin looks and feel soft | 89% | 91% |
Don’t Take our word for it, listen to Ann, Emmy and Cindy!
“After 2 weeks, there was a gradual, yet noticeable difference – smoother, firmer and softer skin. Imagine the results after 2 months or 2 years! The serum is a keeper in my daily routine 😍” – Anne, 47, Combination Skin
“I am 62 and after two weeks of using Eighteen B serum, the skin around my face and neck visibly firmed up. Any woman my age would love this product!” – Emmy, +56, Dry Skin
“This is the Fountain of Youth in a Bottle. Just yesterday, I was waiting for my eye appointment at Costco. Apparently, the optometrist went back and forth calling my name, but she didn’t come over to me because she said I looked too young! (I am 66) YES!” – Cindy, 66, Dry Skin
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**A consumer panel study is when we put our product in the hands of people so that they can try it in their normal routine and give us candid feedback. We ran this trial “blinded” which means they didn’t know which brand of product they were using. The entire test was run third-party, meaning Eighteen B did not collect the data. The data was collected by an unbiased outside group. Consumer panel trials are different from clinical trials, which test products in a controlled manner and the study is administered and monitored by experts and dermatologists. We like to run both clinical and consumer panel trials!
References
silk facial serum