“Caring” for skin used to mean altering—and sometimes damaging—our cells, only to temporarily mimic the appearance of young, healthy tissue. Fortunately, much of our industry has moved beyond these chemicals and procedures that force harmful changes onto the body.
Today’s skincare science works with the body’s cells to promote, nurture, and aid their natural operations.
Stem cells represent the latest, most fundamental step in this natural approach to skincare and overall health.
Bellagena Med Spa is the home of Bradenton stem cell skincare. Here, our professional aestheticians tell you all about how stem cells relate to growth factors and cytokines, and what they can do to promote healthy, natural skin.
What Are Stem Cells?
Stem cells are the versatile starting point for most of the other types of cells in the body.
If we start with the right stem cells, we can then produce other, more specialized cells—like liver cells, blood cells, or skin cells—where those specialized cells didn’t exist before.
This is why stem cells can be miracles for healing damage. Because if they’re harnessed correctly, they should be able to replace tissue that’s been lost or damaged by injury or even disease.
Where Do Stem Cells for Skincare Products Come From?
Different kinds of stem cells can be found in different parts of the body. The most versatile stem cells are found in embryos, where they’re the source of a whole body’s worth of organs and tissues. Obviously, using these types of stem cells for research has been controversial, to say the least.
But today’s skincare scientists can use stem cells sourced from human eggs (not embryos) or from the patient themselves, or from bone marrow sourced from adult, living donors.
Some dermatological products use botanical stem cells derived from plants, though their effectiveness in human cells is unclear.
How Stem Cells Relate to Aging Skin
As the body ages, skin shows the signs of years of sun damage and other conditions, as well as scars from where it has healed well, but with too much inflammation.
At the same time, stem cells drastically reduce with age, which makes the body less adaptable for healing and rebuilding. Collagen-producing cells also become less efficient, furthering the signs of age.
Ideally, stem cells could be used to nurture or regenerate all of these damaged, underproduced and underproducing skin cells.
How Stem Cells Are Already Being Used in Skincare
The trick has been how best to harness the power of stem cells effectively. And that’s what skincare scientists, physicians, researchers and laboratories from leading companies are currently working on.
One such American company is AnteAGE, which has pioneered the use of stem cells in skincare. (Bellagena Med Spa is Bradenton’s only AnteAGE provider, and one of only four providers in the Sarasota-Manatee area.)
Stem Cell-Derived Growth Factors and Cytokines
AnteAGE laboratories in Santa Clara, California, have been focusing on deriving cytokines and growth factors from bone marrow stem cells.
Cytokines, a specialized type of protein, are some of the most important parts of stem cells because they can communicate with other cells and tell them how and when to do their jobs. They’re especially vital in immune system responses like inflammation.
Growth factors are a type of cytokine that triggers healing and cell regeneration.
AnteAGE products have been formulated to combine the healing and regenerative powers of growth factors with the pro-inflammatory (healing) and anti-inflammatory (regenerative) properties of other cytokines. The results are skin that is able to heal itself from past damages and also regenerate and rejuvenate with abundant, youthful new skin cells, and without scarring.
(Keep in mind that there are no actual, whole “stem cells” in these products; only specific proteins and media that have been derived from lab-cultured stem cells.)
Stem Cell Skincare in Bradenton
The beauty of stem cell skincare has been the ability to encourage—and even trigger—the body’s specialized cells to achieve peak performance.
Bellagena remains at the forefront of stem cell skincare in Bradenton. As Manatee County’s only AnteAGE provider, our certified aestheticians can recommend the treatments and products that will ignite your own cells’ best healing properties and regeneration. Thanks to stem cells, the results are beautiful, healthy skin that you yourself created.
