An anti-oxidant found in red wine, resveratrol has been shown to have remarkable anti-ageing effects. But before you reach for the bottle, there's a catch. You'll need to swig 1500 bottles of red wine a day to get the same effect that Aussie scientist Dr David A Sinclair observed in his headline-making study at the end of 2006.
Dr Sinclair's original work stems from 15 years of research by Dr Leonard Guarente from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who, in 1995, found a gene that controlled the life span of yeast. Together, the scientists discovered that these longevity genes are switched on by calorie restriction – a diet with all the necessary vitamins and nutrients, but with 40 per cent fewer calories.
As a near-starvation diet is off the menu for most of us (try living off the equivalent of your breakfast all day), imagine if you could just pop a pill that mimicked calorie restriction. Well, resveratrol might just be the key ingredient that unlocks a longer, healthier life.
The groundbreaking research by Dr Sinclair didn't escape the attention of Estée Lauder's Dr Daniel Maes. "I have a gut feeling these findings are going to be huge for the future of anti-ageing," says Dr Maes. "We knew we could develop a technology to create a product that would increase cellular longevity, leading to healthier cells and a delay in the ageing process."
Estée Lauder is now leading the way with its recently-launched Re-Nutriv Ultimate Youth Creme.
The groundbreaking research on resveratrol by Dr Sinclair's Harvard lab has been tested further by Dr Daniel Maes, vice president of global research and development for the Estée Lauder brands. He explains, "In a world where everyone wants to speed things up, we need to take things more slowly when it comes to our skin. We believe it's more important to slow down cellular division to give the cells time to do what they have to do when they divide, which is mostly to repair DNA."
According to Dr Maes, when skin is exposed to environmental factors like UV light, smoke and ozone, it can cause an inflammatory reaction – one of the main culprits of the ageing process. This inflammation prompts cells to divide faster, so new cells go to the skin surface more rapidly. Skin cells are programmed to only divide a specific number of times, so if you accelerate cellular division too much, your cells reach the end of their life cycle quicker. This results in ageing with a very thin skin because there are fewer skin cells. Cells that live in the fast lane also don't have enough time to adequately repair any DNA damage.
While resveratrol was already known to Dr Maes for its strong anti-oxidant, whitening and anti-inflammatory properties, his own tests proved that high doses of resveratrol had impressive effects on the longevity of cells in the dermis and epidermis.
It took eight years of research, but Dr Maes and the Estée Lauder team eventually came up with Resveratrate – or the "Youth Molecule", as they term it – which is five times more potent and six times more expensive than traditional resveratrol.
"It's very concentrated, very stable and, most importantly, gives a time-released dose of resveratrol to the dermis to promote skin cell longevity, and buys the skin cells more time to repair damage." And the figures are impressive. According to Dr Maes, the Youth Molecule provides six times more protection from environmental damage, more than doubling the survival rate of skin cells.
This technology, Dr Maes believes, is best suited to the brand's prestige skincare line, Re-Nutriv, which, since its inception in 1958, has always contained the latest ingredients and technology. "We've developed Re-Nutriv Ultimate Youth Creme to work for the future of your cells, which allows them to live a lot longer, to be healthy, and divide without the risk of creating mutation, and it's inspired by proven research from some of the most prominent scientists in the field of longevity."