With Eyra Care introducing their Luxé Hydration 0.5% Pro-Retinol Renewal Cream, CosBeauty took the opportunity to discuss skincare with founder, Dr Gabi Caswell.
What is Eyra Care Luxé Hydration 0.5% Pro-Retinol Renewal Cream?
This is our latest product and is designed to help repair and renew skin damaged by excess UV exposure. The formula is lipid balanced to moisturise and provide the ideal environment for healthy skin microbiome. The 0.5% Pro-retinol encourages cellular turnover with maximal barrier repair. Soothing botanicals help to calm and moisturise skin.
Apply at night to cleansed skin. (RRP $72 available at www.eyramedical.com.au/shop)
What made you decide to create your own brand of skin care?
Dr Marcells and I worked to create Eyra Care over ten years ago because we were both dissatisfied with what was commercially available for patients. Australia, as you know has terribly sun-damaged skin, this correlates with our skin cancer rate. We wanted to created something that was patient friendly, usable for busy people (that is keep it quick, simple and effective), and everything had to have a positive biological effect on skin.
What makes your products so efficacious?
It’s a matter of understanding skin physiology and biochemistry, and an important concept of balancing or at least not harming, the skin’s microbiome, and finally getting these different aspects to work together. Our advantage is that I have a degree in biochemistry, along with my medical degrees, so innately understand growth cycles, enzymes, and the clinical course of diseases means, meaning that targeted research leads to the creation of meaningful products. You can have the best ingredient in the world, but if it can’t penetrate the skin’s outer keratinized layer, then it cannot do its work. And if you upset the microbiome and leave the patient with alkaline pH, the natural renewal and growth process cannot work as effectively. In our products we work to balance these elements, and then couple with clinically proven ingredients, whose effect has been peer reviewed. I have a fantastic lab partner, it’s great to be able to speak molecule!
Can you explain the formulation and active ingredients?
Each product is formulated differently, so it’s best to discuss by “groups” of products.
Our serums are made to treat a particular concern, so when we see a clinical need, for example elastosis and pigmentation, we search for an effective ingredient that will treat these conditions. The serums in our range are designed to slip into anybody’s favourite skin care routine, or to be used in combination with out other products. Crystal C is a topical anti-oxidant, the Acne Serum acts as a spot or broad spectrum treatment, the Anti-Aging Night Serum complements mature and sun-damage skin, to boost a treatment program.
I prefer the Pro-retinol in our formulations as they can be very effective in positively affecting the skin, but not at the irritant level that their prescription cousins cause. As a result patients are compliant and see results relatively quickly. Vitamin A derivatives are good for a broad range of conditions, they can help treat acne, pigmentation, visibly improve sun-damaged skin, help with fine lines and wrinkles, and have a skin-cancer protective effect, and can go some way to thickening collagen.
People are often concerned that their skin may turn pink in the sun, this is a caution you have had enough sun. The Pro-retinols have a double chemical bond in their make up, this absorbs the UV rays and in the process causes an inter-dermal dermatitis. This transient condition passes, but it is also as 99% effective as a zinc sunscreen. Apart from any form of Vitamin A, I have two favourite ingredients, colloidal gold which is wonderfully calming and Lipo-Chromin-6 that tackles pigmentation and inflammation.
Our acne range utilises NDGA a natural product that is naturally anti-sebum and kills all causes of infection that contributes to acne by osmosis, including bacterial and fungal infections. We make this in an environmentally friend scrub and serum that can be used as spot treatment. We couple these with a nice light, non-noxious moisturiser, and all packing is asexual, and made to be dropped in the shower!
Our range of moisturises are designed to advance with the patient, and they start with the Pro-Retinol Renewal Creams, available in 0.5% and 1%, and move towards the ‘heavy lifters’, creams that are designed to rehabilitate sun-damage skin. There is the Eyra Care Nightly Intensive Repair with Niacinamide 5%, packed with vitamins to sooth and smooth the skin. Mature female skin benefits from the Eyra Care Anti-Aging Night Repair deliberately designed for sun-damaged and aged skin. Its combination of liposomal Retinol, Lipo-Chromin-6 and plant derived oestrogenic chemicals help to reduce inflammation, firm up collagen and rehabilitate sun-damaged skin.
And our newest edition, Luxé Hydration 0.5% Pro-retinol Renewal Cream is flying off the shelf, it is made from slightly different technology utilising the power of botanical and lipid balancing technology often employed in baby eczema products.
What types of skin will benefit most from these products?
We have attempted to cater for the most common problems we see in clinic, acne, rosacea, pigmentation, ageing and sun-damage, and sometimes all at once!
Post menopausal women lose a lot of the tensile strength in their skin, as female skin is oestrogen dependant. Ideally starting a program early so that the Vitamin A products can effect a double time treatment, and then moving into the plant based steroids helps enormously with the look and feel of post menopausal skin.
Men too, however, really benefit from our Crystal C serum, as it helps with the daily sun-damage, and many have undiagnosed roasaca, which we know is greatly helped by Vitamin C application. We are country based, but men can be quite metrosexual when it comes to skin.
Teenagers (and parents) love the acne range, because its topical and they see good results. What we are able to do is combine products to create a program individualised for each patient.
What are your hero products?
I think my absolute favourites would be the Anti-Aging Night Serum (AANS) and our newest edition Luxé Hydration 0.5% Pro-retinol Renewal Cream, before we created this cream the Crème Cleanser was a firm 2nd!
The AANS has been a clinic favourite for a number of years, it’s an add-in serum, used under your chosen night cream. It delivers another round of retinol and Lipo-Chromin-6 to boost results. Often why we call the serums the skin boosters!
The Luxé Hydration 0.5% Pro-retinol Renewal Cream is a new product that came out of research into microbiome and some eczema products. Exploring a few ranges made for babies we noticed the attention paid to lipid balanced creams and began experimenting.
After the kitchen experiments moved to the laboratory we had a few faithful supporters try the cream, and the feedback was great. So a bit more tweaking, and it has proven to be very popular, with the first batch almost sold out in two weeks, despite lockdown and interruptions to clinic!
Where are the products available?
Usually we offer products to patients in clinic, however changing social needs in the pandemic has pushed us to create an online stores.
The range of products is available at eyramedical.com.au/shop and eyracare.com.au.
About Dr Gabi Caswell
Dr Gabrielle Caswell is president of the Australasian College of Aesthetic Medicine (ACAM) and a Cosmetic Physician operating a number of Eyra Medical and Skin Clinics in NSW, as well as a partner in developing the Eyra Care therapeutic skin care range for clinics.
In addition, she maintains therapeutic skills for skin cancer medicine and general practice.
Dr Caswell was introduced to injectable cosmetic medicine by a colleague and began to research the growing medical aesthetic profession. This led to an interest in laser technology and other tools that modern medicine uses for the remediation of sun-damaged skin.
