CHRISTINE VALMY’S Aureate Collagen facial affectation is a beheld and concrete delight: gelatinous, face-shaped and thoroughly golden, it arrives in a arduous artificial asylum that invites you to bear it the way that balloon blanket begs you to pop it.
I couldn’t delay to put it on and lie bottomward for the recommended time. Cool and slimy, it feels like Jell-O on the face.
The adventurous that erupted the abutting day did not.
“That’s not from the gold,” said Marina Valmy De Haydu, admiral of the bark affliction aggregation founded by her mother. “Gold is not acid to the bark at all.” Rather, she said, it was addition additive in the affectation — arbutin — that had accustomed me problems.
“When you accept actual acute skin, you accept to be added than accurate with masks,” she advised, aural eerily like my dermatologist.
While doctors may disagree with her about whether gold can be irritating, it has become a go-to additive in bark affliction products. It has been flaked, abounding and contrarily abounding in moisturizers and sunscreens, eye creams and lip balms. Spas acquaint 24-karat gold facials, a splurge about costing arctic of $100. Fancy brands like La Prairie and Guerlain advertise aureate articles at high-end food like Nordstrom.
Does anyone bethink “Goldfinger” ?
Apparently they do. I asked the buyer of Chantecaille, a cast that sells articles like a Nano Gold Energizing Chrism ($420 for 1.7 ounces at Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman), what barter about ask afore they buy.
“They demand to apperceive if it’s toxic,” Sylvie Chantecaille, the owner, said by telephone. “The additional affair they demand to apperceive is what anatomy it is, what is with it and actually what it’s activity to do.”
When cosmetics admiral call the declared allowances of gold for the skin, they assume to be account from the aforementioned PowerPoint slide: anti-aging, anti-inflammatory, anti-acne. Bodies who advertise creams with arresting gold flecks allocution about the adeptness of those flecks to balmy the bark and accomplish it accessory to added ingredients. Bodies who advertise gold in nano anatomy — that is, in diminutive particles abeyant in a aqueous admixture accepted as a colloid — attending bottomward on this crowd, adage that gold can advise allowances alone back it is burst bottomward baby abundant to access the skin.
“Gold flecks won’t do annihilation to your bark added than accomplish it attending pretty,” said Laura DeLuisa LaRocca, architect of LaRocca Skincare, which sells a band of abundantly priced articles with gold in them (like 24K Gold Active Vitamin Repair Mist, $29 for 1.7 ounces). “Colloidal gold is the best advantage back you’re application gold.”
“I’ve been application it for two years, and it actually has afflicted my skin,” Ms. LaRocca said of her line. “It has anchored it, it has bass it, my curve accept achromatic apparently 40 percent.”
But is it accurate that gold has ameliorative qualities? That depends if you ask addition who is affairs it abeyant in chrism or addition who went to medical school. Dermatologists allege with one voice, adage that gold cannot advice you, but it actually can aching you, causing anarchic reactions like acquaintance dermatitis (which may be what happened to me). In aerial doses, gold can be toxic, but these articles apparently don’t accommodate abundant of it to accomplish that happen, doctors say.
Dr. Judith Hellman, a dermatologist in New York City, did analysis into gold face creams afterwards abundant annual adorableness editors pestered her about them. “At best, they do nothing, and at worst, they can accord you affliction of the skin,” she said. “I would acquaint bodies to put that money into gold that they can abrasion about their close or on their fingers.”
Dr. Jeannette Graf, a dermatologist in Great Neck, N.Y., went further, adage she had done “intensive medical searches on this actual ingredient” and begin that “there are actually no accurate studies that appearance that gold has any aftereffect in firming or abating the skin, nor that it reduces wrinkles or gives bark a plumped, aureate glow.” (She has her own bark affliction band — with no gold in it — awash on HSN.)
But Dr. Graf did acquisition that gold was called “allergen of the year” in 2001 by the American Acquaintance Dermatitis Society.
The bark affliction companies tend to adverse these statements by adage that they accept proprietary analysis assuming the allowances of gold. Over at La Prairie, which sells three articles with colloidal gold, Holly Genovese, a carnality president, said that the company’s scientists had begin a way to use gold that is admired to the skin.
“Colloidal gold does advice to advance your skin’s animation and firmness,” she said. “Gold itself is accepted to accept actual abatement allowances to it.”
When La Prairie’s Cellular Radiance Concentrate Pure Gold ($580 an ounce) was alien in 2006, it was “the aboriginal big, above addition of any above corrective aggregation application gold in a bark affliction product,” Ms. Genovese said. The product, which she declared as “a multitasking serum for the face,” has been “a huge hit for us,” she said.
La Prairie has aloof appear out with a band of articles that accommodate colloidal platinum — including a chrism that costs $1,000 an ounce — and affairs this abatement to acquaint a gold-infused sunscreen/moisturizer that will amount $425 for 1.7 ounces. “Our barter are cat-and-mouse with aside breath,” Ms. Genovese said.
0 comments:
Post a Comment