WHOEVER SAID “TIME MAY BE A GREAT HEALER, but it’s a lousy beautician” would be stunned by a skin care aisle today. Soft-cheeked girls as young as 8 flood cosmetics stores in search of anti-wrinkle products, spawning the hashtag #SephoraKids. “Skinfluencers” permeate our social media feeds with reviews of $120 peel pads and $325 lotions to add to our daily regimens. On TikTok, filters transform our timeworn faces into eerily realistic teenage versions.
For a generation that grew up on selfies and now lives on Zoom, the pursuit of youthful-looking skin has never felt so extreme, yet so accepted. Recent headlines include “Gen-Z Is Already Worried About Looking Old,” “I’d Rather Die Hot Than Live Ugly” and “Kim Kardashian Would ‘Eat Poop’ to Look Younger.” The global skin care industry will balloon 67% in the next eight years to nearly $200 billion, according to some predictions.
While we can’t stop aging, business opportunists are always hawking miracle bronzers, serums and toners to fend off its effects on our faces, sometimes based on dubious science. But as technology has advanced, research-backed companies have also emerged with real promises.
Mblue Labs, founded in 2018 at the University of Maryland, is touting a splash in the fountain of youth with products featuring a 150-year-old antioxidant called methylene blue that penetrates skin all the way into the cell. By extending cellular life, it appears to slow outward signs of aging.
Mblue says its customer base extends into 42 countries. Kevin Harrington of “Shark Tank” fame endorsed its flagship face cream. In September, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce named Mblue one of America’s top 100 small businesses, praising its “groundbreaking skin health technology” backed by “rigorous scientific research.”
The person behind the science is Kan Cao, a professor with UMD’s Department of Cell Biology and Molecular Genetics. Since first using methylene blue to turbocharge a skin cell in a petri dish, she has ascended as a national authority on skin aging.
But Cao wasn’t looking for a way to help 50-year-olds look 30 when she made this discovery. She was trying to save teenagers born with a rare genetic disease from dying.
HUTCHINSON-GILFORD PROGERIA SYNDROME is better known as simply progeria—“prematurely old” in ancient Greek. After appearing typical at birth, children with the disease develop skin that becomes veiny and wrinkled like an elderly person’s. Other symptoms include a beaked nose, small chin, fragile joints, hardened arteries and the loss of hair and body fat.
It’s also a killer. The average kid with progeria dies at 14, typically from heart attack or stroke. Symptoms that emerge during the toddler years send mystified parents scrambling for answers until the devastating diagnosis arrives.
For 15-year-old Carlos Silva, the news came at age 3, after his hair had begun falling out and his skin appeared burned in places. “My whole life I knew, because people stare at you,” he says. “My mother taught me from a young age that I was different but shouldn’t feel ashamed.” Still, “the hardest part is others’ reactions,” he acknowledges. Many people ask if he has cancer.
The disease is incredibly rare. Only about 400 cases are thought to exist worldwide, including 13 known progeria patients in the United States. Unsurprisingly, the medical community didn’t prioritize it. Then in 1999, a Massachusetts physician whose son had the disease co-founded the Progeria Research Foundation to seek a cure. Among other things, the organization arranged for patients’ skin cells to be donated to science. That got the attention of a physician named Francis Collins.