Hyaluronic acid skin boosters: the holy grail of skin health

Skincare and skin health have risen to ever-increasing prominence in public opinion in recent years, with many attributing its boom in popularity to the COVID-19 pandemic and the associated periods of mandated isolation. In a survey of 2000 respondents conducted in 2021, 63% of millennial consumers and 57% of Generation Z participants in the United States took their skincare routine seriously (Petruzzi, 2022), and 43% of UK adults increasingly consider non-surgical procedures as a normal part of their beauty and personal care routine, which is mirrored by a 40% drop in cosmetic surgeries since 2015 according to the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons (Mintel Group, 2021).

Compounds such as hyaluronic acid (HA) are currently regarded by many in the beauty and aesthetics industry as integral to the development and maintenance of healthy and aesthetically pleasing skin, and there are many claims regarding HA's ability and efficacy in moisturising and rejuvenating the skin. It is thus incorporated into many topical skincare products, with some of these erroneously and misleadingly marketed as topical ‘fillers’. However, it must be noted that topical HA is unable to rival the efficacy of injectable HA, due to the fact that topically applied products—even those containing smaller HA molecules—will never be able to penetrate further than the epidermis, the topmost layer of the skin (Lui and Nassim, 2020).