Nanotechnology-Enhanced Natural Skincare

Elsom Research President Dr. Yechiel will be the speaker at two upcoming nanotechnology-related events:

At the Nanomaterials Application Center Colloquium September 8, 2008, his presentation, “Nano-Tooling versus Nano-Sizing”, will be be available free to registered attendees live or by video conference at several Texas locations including Austin, College Station, Dallas, San Antonio, Houston, and The Woodlands. An abstract of the presentation follows:

“While nano-sizing is an accredited feature of nano-technology, it is at the same time the more basic, simple, and even simplistic aspect for looking at nano-technology. Nano-sizing is an ancient trick and was even applied in potions made in ancient Egypt and other ancient cultures by simple - prolonged - grinding. On the other hand, patterning of small particles involves a completely different level of complexity and sophistication. Tooling in nano-technology implies that the real challenges of the field begin where small particles are thought to be organized in certain patterns rather than randomly distributed. Nano-technology exposes its great challenges mostly where special applications and tooling are co-developed.”

As part of International Technology Week in Dallas, Dr. Yechiel’s October 3 presentation on the “Biology and Medicine” track at nanoTX’08 will be “Nano-Encapsulation Technology Overcomes Aesthetic Limitations of Food and Skincare Ingredients”.  This presentation will discuss some recent challenging projects at Elsom Research, in which innovative encapsulation techniques and small particle sizes make beneficial-but-unpleasant materials available for use in foods and cosmetics.

You’ve certainly noticed that the cost of almost everything has gone up in the past year. As manufacturers, we face this problem in many directions: prices have increased for the supplies and equipment we buy; transportation costs are higher, both for the raw ingredients we have shipped to us and for the finished products we send out to our customers; budgets are tighter, so shoppers who might have previously stocked up with the largest-available size are now buying just enough to get by; money is tight, and it seems as if this may be the situation for a while.

The easy thing for us to do about the current financial crunch would be to join the crowd and raise all our prices, passing along our increased expenses to consumers. It would be easy, but it would be pointless: higher prices won’t make it easier for shoppers with already-stretched budgets to buy our high-quality cosmeceuticals. We may have to increase our prices someday, but that day has not arrived: we haven’t run out of creative ideas yet!

Since we’ve chosen not to pass on higher costs to consumers, we are implementing better ideas in two categories. First, we’ve been implementing more cost-effective ways to work; you won’t be able to notice many of these but some, such as changing the way we process online sales and re-designing The Formulator, you’ve probably already noticed. Second, and most interesting, we have developed and are now offering for sale two kinds of reasonably-priced skincare, made with the same great care and attention to detail as our more costly cosmeceutical products.

• At the-formulator.com, you can select a simple emollient base for $9.99, optionally adding one essential oil or botanical ingredient to create a 2oz (55gr) custom lotion. Because you choose which ingredient to add, with the price of each ingredient clearly posted, you control both the content and the cost of your lotion.
• At lotion-potion.com, you can choose from our new retail product line of “simple skincare“, featuring lotions and creams rich in vitamins and botanicals. We are launching this line with eight new skincare products, ranging in price from $9.95 for4oz moisturizing milk with essential oil of grapefruit (for morning) or lavender (for evening) to $34.95 for 1oz cream with 15% Vitamins C, E, and A. In addition to great prices, important ingredients, and our special formulation techniques, our new Lotion-Potion products feature something extra: poetry! Please check out lotion-potion.com, and let us know what you think.

We continue to develop new retail cosmeceuticals and to expand the list of ingredients you can add to your custom micro-batch via The Formulator. Watch this blog for announcements!

The new and improved Formulator is available at http://www.the-formulator.com. It includes some interesting new features and is easier to operate; its design is consistent with that of our store for stock cosmeceuticals. Many new ingredients have been added. We have also added an option for creation of low-cost single-herb extracts in emollient oil to allow customers to try an idea they have about a specific herb without a major expenditure. It’s fun to experiment with it and formulate your own product according to your own preferences and budget; please give it a try and let us know what you think.

Elsom Research manages a BUNCH of websites! The ones we think you might be interested in in are listed on the right side of the main blog page, under the heading “Blogroll“. Most of our sites have internal search tools (see the “Search” button on the upper right of the main blog page), so you can easily search an entire site for a word or phrase you hope appears somewhere within the site. What hasn’t been so easy is to search multiple sites: maybe you read something in a forum posting, or maybe it was a Journal of Topical Formulations article, or maybe it was announced in this weblog or explained on a product information page at the main Elsom Research site, and all you know is that it’s out there somewhere and you’d like to see it again.

To make it easier to find information without searching each site separately, we have used Google Custom Search to configure an Elsom Research Search Engine. We’ve placed a Google Gadget giving access to our custom search engine on several pages already: it’s available at the main Elsom Research FAQ, on our Shopping Help page, in the header of every page in our cosmeceuticals shop, and here:

If it works well (please let us know what you think!), we’ll sprinkle it more widely around our collection of websites so we’ll all have an easier time finding the good information we know is out there.

We are working on major changes to The-Formulator, our custom micro-batch formulation technology, and to its Web site, the-formulator.com. We expect that it may take several months for these changes to be completed. Meanwhile, our own line of retail cosmeceuticals remains available at new-equilibrium-skincare but we are not accepting micro-batch orders for customized individual retail-size products; the smallest custom batch we can produce is 2Kg (4.4Lbs). This is very much smaller than the minimum batch size of other custom formulators, so we expect that small startup businesses and individuals who wish to experiment with innovative cosmeceuticals will continue to find our flexible formulation services uniquely useful. Of course, when a new and improved The-Formulator is available we will announce that here, and you are always welcome to share your ideas about The-Formulator in the Topical Formulations forum.

One of our old products, Anabolin™, which is based on anabolic ingredients, is now re-introduced for retail consumers. For several years, Anabolin™ was available only for special batch orders. Consumers of topical products have increased interest in products containing ingredients which may have anabolic effects in oral formulations, and wish to have them in their topicals. When we first came out with Anabolin™ ten years ago, consumers of topicals felt more comfortable spending money for things they could swallow rather than things they could apply to their skin. However, consumers are now more appreciative of the art of topical nourishment of the skin and its great advantages in targeting ingredients to needed areas only. Anabolin™ is available for shipment now and can be ordered at new-equilibrium-skincare.com.

Another product, JuveLine™, is our new scalp care product for resetting the juvenile appearance of the hairline. A basic product description of JuveLine™ is available on its information page at elsomresearch.com; you are also invited to discuss it with us in the Journal of Topical Formulations’ scalp care forum. Because JuveLine™ is complementary to and compatible with NanoScalp™, until the end of 2007 we will add one free NanoScalp™ to each order of Juveline™. This is in addition to our 2-for-1 offer which remains in effect through the end of 2007: buy 1 JuveLine™, get 3 items (1 paid JuveLine™, 1 free JuveLine™, 1 free NanoScalp™). JuveLine™ will be available for shipment November 5, 2007 and can be ordered at new-equilibrium-skincare.com.

At Elsom Research, we are always looking for a better way to do what we do. To support our online shoppers, our latest step forward is a complete upgrade and redesign of our shopping site to use two state-of-the-art e-commerce tools: the osCommerce shopping cart for product selection and Google Checkout for credit purchases. Both tools are widely used; once you visit our new site, you may realize that you are familiar with its structure from your visits to other online retailers.

At its new location, www.new-equilibrium-skincare.com, our shopping site will use Google Checkout to provide all of us with excellent protection against fraud. Google Checkout will also enable us to offer some new flexibility, such as acceptance of American Express and Discover cards, which our credit-card shoppers have long requested. For shoppers who choose not to use credit cards, payments by check or money order will now be processed in a simpler and better-integrated way than we have been able to offer in the past. osCommerce is feature-rich and supports customizations and extensions to make our shopping cart system easy for you to use and for us to manage The feature set you see in our shopping site will be adjusted and optimized as we learn from your feedback; we are very happy to make this new system available.

Our old shopping site will remain active briefly while we process the first orders through www.new-equilibrium-skincare.com and confirm that it is working smoothly. After that, we will proceed with redirecting the shopping links from our informational sites to send surfers to the correct pages within the new shopping site.

To encourage you to try our new and improved shopping site, we have a special offer: until the end of 2007, all orders placed through www.new-equilibrium-skincare.com will be doubled! We understand that all change can be a little unnerving; this offer is our way of thanking you for being patient while we make this change, and for helping us by using the site and letting us know what you think of it.

To begin 2-for-1 shopping, visit http://www.new-equilibrium-skincare.com/cosmeceuticals/

To read our HELP information about the new shopping site, visit http://www.new-equilibrium-skincare.com/help.htm

Dr. Yechiel is the featured expert in the “Nanotechnology in Skincare?” article in the Summer-Fall 2007 issue of New Beauty. An online version of the article, with expanded text and without illustrations, is available under the title “Skin deeper” from Scripps News.

At the first “Accelerating the Future” conference on skin care ingredients and technologies, Dr. Yechiel will be speaking in an Anti-Aging seminar on the question of “Too Many Anti-Oxidants?”. The conference will be held in New York City, March 17-19, 2008.

Beginning September 23, 2007, this is the news and announcements page (web log) for Elsom Research products and projects. Only brief announcements will be posted here; longer essays and presentations will continue to be provided in the Journal of Topical Formulations, and interactive discussion is still available through the Topical Formulations Forum.