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My Skin Barrier Was So Damaged Until I Found This $28 Serum on TikTok

Welcome to Deep Reviews —your one-stop destination to discover the absolute best products and brands the beauty industry has to offer. The Who What Wear staffers you already know and trust will research, test, and review the market's most sought-after and buzzed-about products to see which formulas (of the hundreds up for consideration) are worth your hard-earned money and attention. You can expect honest, uncensored feedback and no-BS recommendations our hard-to-please testers endorse without reservations.

The majority of our Deep Reviews will feature our editors' honest, ultra-hot takes on entire product categories or multiple products from a particular beauty brand, but every so often, we'll sprinkle in a special single-product format called Honestly, I Love It . As the name suggests, these reviews will hone in on one standout beauty formula our editors can't shut up about. This time around, I'm highlighting Experiment Skincare's Super Saturated ($28).

If you've dealt with extensive skin barrier damage like I have, then you know how frustrating it can be trying to find the right products to hydrate your skin. If your skin barrier isn't in great shape, it has a hard time holding on to moisture, no matter how much you apply. I've tried countless products that claim to repair the skin barrier with no luck, but I recently found a different kind of support formula that achieved the impossible for me.

To give you a bit more backstory on my skin, I've been dealing with severe dehydration and barrier damage. This happened after I used tretinoin for years without getting enough hydration. Back then, I fully believed the way to clear up my acne was by drying my skin out. I now know how seriously wrong that was thanks to a little education from dermatologists and aestheticians, but unfortunately, by the time I did learn, the damage had been done. I don't use tretinoin anymore and am a huge advocate for more gentle retinoids, but my barrier was left stripped, dry, sensitive, and reactive after that. I'm now (slowly, but surely) healing it by keeping things gentle and hydrating my skin at every turn.

As I mentioned above, though, it's tough for your skin to hold on to moisture when your barrier is so damaged—it takes a high concentration of hydrating actives to trigger those repair mechanisms. Luckily, TikTok-famous brand Experiment offers a $28 formula that does the trick. I began using it with low expectations since I'd used a lot of barrier repair formulas previously that didn't do much, but this serum is the real deal.

I'm really into Experiment and its approach because the brand doesn't do the obvious when it comes to formulation. Rather than putting out a hydrating serum that's like everything else on the market, one of the brand's co-founders Lisa Guerrera told me that they wanted to create a super hydrator that doesn't feature typical ingredients like hyaluronic acid. Instead, they decided to use a 30 percent concentration of glycerin, a well-tolerated and loved hydrating ingredient that when used in higher concentrations can repair the skin barrier.

As you can see in the "Before" photo above, my skin was pretty dull and dehydrated—it also felt a bit like sandpaper on the surface. After using Super Saturated for just three weeks, I started to notice a huge difference in my skin. It felt less tight and dry for starters, and even after just a few days of use, it gave me a serious dewy glow.

I know that repairing my skin barrier won't happen overnight, and it's still not perfect by any means, but this is a formula I actually believe can do the trick. It does have a thicker consistency that feels a bit tacky upon application so that's something to be aware of, but I find that it absorbs quickly. It leaves your skin feeling soft and hydrated, but no sticky after-feel. It's also amazing to use as a base for makeup. I noticed that every time I wore it under foundation, my makeup applied so smoothly and made my skin look extra airbrushed. It's true—great makeup application starts with a hydrating skincare base.

I also noticed that since I began using this, my skin holds on to moisture a lot better which is key for the repair process. I do sleep with a humidifier at night which also helps lock water into the skin barrier, but I credit this product as making the most difference so far. My barrier also just looks less red, angry, and dehydrated. Guerrera also shared a great pro tip with me that helps lock the formula in even further. You can pair Super Saturated with the brand's reusable sheet mask Avant Guard ($19) for your juiciest, most hydrated skin. I just apply a few extra pumps of Super Saturated than I would normally use and leave the sheet mask on for an hour. My skin feels so soft afterward.

I'll get into a few of the other star ingredients in this formula below.

Like I mentioned above, this formula features a whopping 30 percent concentration of glycerin. This is a lot higher than most other serums on the market that feature glycerin as an ingredient. In concentrations of 25% or above, glycerin immediately increases water content in the skin, enhances its ability to retain moisture, and even repairs the skin barrier. In addition, high molecular weight polyglutamic acid hydrates the skin's surface, giving it a plump, dewy appearance.

It also does a great job of soothing redness and irritation with ingredients like bisabolol (an active ingredient in chamomile) and prickly pear extract which binds moisture into the skin while protecting against irritation from stronger actives (like retinoids). Allantoin acts as another soothing ingredient that helps speed the recovery of stressed-out skin. It's also one of my all-time favorite ingredients since it works so well for my sensitive, acne-prone skin. Lastly, niacinamide rounds out the formula which does so many great things including controlling excess oil, improving barrier function, and lightening dark spots.

Guerrera shared a bit more about Experiment and specifically why Super Saturated is such a starring formula. Being two chemists, Guerrera and her co-founder Emmy Ketcham want to carve out a new space in the beauty industry that's rooted in education and fun, experimental skincare. "Our main mission with Experiment is to reimagine what 'science' looks like in beauty and ultimately change how consumers relate and interact with science in their everyday lives," she explains. 'Science' in beauty has looked one way for so long: black and white, lab coats, dropper bottles, and sterile. While it builds trust with consumers, it doesn’t present science as something relatable, cool, [and] fun! That’s why Experiment focuses on really unique, fun, and deeply efficacious products to show science can be colorful, culturally cool, and kinda weird!"

Super Saturated is the perfect formula to showcase this. "Hydrating serums is such a crowded, undifferentiated category filled with serums that by and large feature hyaluronic acid as the primary hydrating ingredient and the star of the product formula—and their textures tend to be very similar across the board," she says. "What makes Super Saturated so unique is the high, 30 percent glycerin concentration in a water-based serum format with a stringy, gloopy texture that our community of self-proclaimed 'Lab Rats' love! Glycerin is a very common ingredient, but it's usually in smaller concentrations (less than five percent) in most of your skincare. [This is] because high amounts of glycerin can get sticky and tricky to formulate with… so Super Saturated was very hard to pull off formulation-wise. But it was worth it because, at concentrations above 25%, glycerin gains these really amazing irritation-protection and barrier-repairing properties. The texture isn’t sticky per se, but it's definitely a 'heavy-weight.'

While it wasn't easy to formulate, Guerrera and Ketcham knew they had something special on their hands. "I’m blessed to have an amazing co-founder, Emmy, who is the chemist and formulator behind all our skincare. We have an in-house lab that allows us to really experiment (pun intended) and find the best formulas. Our primary goal was to create the most effective hydrating serum that was essential in your routine and was truly bringing something new to the market. With Super Saturated, we wanted glycerin to be the star ingredient even though most beauty marketers ignore it as a 'boring' ingredient. We knew, as chemist founders, that glycerin is really one of the best hydrators we have and has so many other cool properties beyond hydration. I remember when Emmy came to me with the first formulation of Super Saturated, she [said], 'I was messing around in the lab and I made this 30% glycerin concentrate thing—not sure if it's a good idea, though,' and the second she said that I knew we had something our community would love . It took a lot of tweaking to get the texture just right, so we did over 40 iterations on the product."

Guerrera even shared a few ways she likes to use this one in her routine. "When my skin needs heavy-duty hydration and soothing I like to 'marinate' (that's what I call it) in Super Saturated. I do about four to five pumps of [it] and layer my Avant Guard reusable sheet mask on top and hang out for 30 minutes or more. Because of the ear loops on Avant Guard, I can do some cleaning around my apartment or do work without the mask slipping. The mask really force feeds your skin the serum and your skin is so plump and calm after. It can really heal any irritation quickly and it’s great for makeup prep too!"

More Experiment Products I Love

Shawna Hudson has worked in editorial for over six years, with experience covering entertainment, fashion, culture, celebrities, and her favorite topic of all, beauty. She graduated from California State University, Fullerton, with a degree in journalism and has written for other publications such as Bustle, The Zoe Report, Byrdie , Elite Daily, Mane Addicts, and more. She is currently an associate beauty editor at Who What Wear and hopes to continue feeding her (completely out-of-control) beauty obsession as long as she can. Stay up to date on her latest finds on Instagram @shawnasimonee.

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Super Saturated Barrier Support Concentrate

What is it.

They say: Not hydrated, saturated. Super Saturated is a barrier support serum with 30% glycerin– aka your skin’s fave hydrator. At higher percentages glycerin goes beyond hydration to unlock its unique barrier replenishing and soothing properties. This one-of-a-kind saturating blue goo also has multi-molecular weight humectants like polyglutamic acid, and super soothers like bisabolol, prickly pear... Not hydrated, saturated. Super Saturated is a barrier support serum with 30% glycerin– aka your skin’s fave hydrator. At higher percentages glycerin goes beyond hydration to unlock its unique barrier replenishing and soothing properties. This one-of-a-kind saturating blue goo also has multi-molecular weight humectants like polyglutamic acid, and super soothers like bisabolol, prickly pear extract, and niacinamide to keep irritation at bay. Super Saturated is clinically proven to increase skin's resilience and natural hydration overtime.

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About the brand

They say: "We want a beauty world that makes science cool– hyper effective products that never take themselves too seriously. We started Experiment because the state of our beauty routines is wayyy too complicated. It’s time we go beyond the confusing rules, misleading marketing, and over consumption that rule beauty. So we dreamed big: a world where your beauty routine was hyper effective, but never boring or something you had to stress over."

Full Ingredient List

Water, Glycerin, Propanediol, Niacinamide, Diglycerin, Squalane, Polyacrylate Crosspolymer-6, Allantoin, Phenoxyethanol, Bisabolol, Sodium Polyacrylate, Methylparaben, Polyglutamic Acid, Tocopherol, Disodium EDTA, Opuntia Ficus-Indica Stem Extract, Malachite Extract, Ethylparaben, Caprylyl Glycol, Zingiber Officinale (Ginger) Root Extract

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• Skin Treatments

Experiment Super Saturated Barrier Support Serum, 1.35 fl oz/40 mL

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How safe is it?

Ingredients (20), product description.

Not hydrated, saturated. Super Saturated is a barrier support serum with 30% glycerin aka your skin’s fave hydrator.

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SkinSAFE 100 Free

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Common Preservative Free

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Paraben Free

Lanolin Free

Coconut Free

Topical Antibiotic Free

MCI/MI Free

Nickel Free

Gluten Free

Propylene Glycol Free

Balsam of Peru Free

Irritant Free

SkinTok’s Favourite Glycerin-Based Product: The Rundown On Experiment’s Super Saturated Serum

Whether it be  UNIQLO’s viral bag  or the  Dyson Airwrap , we have all fallen victim to the “TikTok made me buy it” phenomenon at one point or another. And with SkinTok obsessing over a new serum, it may be time to add another product to our collection. 

Earlier this month, Gen Z-driven skincare brand Experiment dropped the  Super Saturated  barrier repair serum, and rave reviews have been flooding TikTok ever since. 

@experimentwrld 30% glycerin? polyglutamic acid?? prickly pear extract??? bisabolol???? niacinamide????? say less 😮‍💨 ~~~ #glycerin #polyglutamicacid #niacinamide #serum #hydratingserum #dryskin #chemistry #dryskincare #dermtok #skintok #dehydratedskin #hyaluronicacid #humectant #experiment #supersaturated #skinbarrier #barrierrepair ♬ COLDEST OF THEM ALL – veggibeats

According to Experiment’s website, the product is a “one-of-a-kind saturating blue goo” that is “clinically proven to increase skin’s resilience and natural hydration over time.”

Many skinfluencers have praised the product for its high concentration of glycerin, citing the ingredient as a necessity for deep hydration and repair. The Super Saturated serum, formulated with 30% glycerin, breaks away from other popular moisturising products, given that the ingredient is  typically used in concentrations of 5%  or less.  

Experiment  claims  that “in concentrations above 25%, glycerin gains a few superpowers beyond hydration, like replenishing the skin barrier and protecting skin from irritation.”

View this post on Instagram A post shared by EXPERIMENT (@experimentwrld)

Of course, Experiment has gained traction on SkinTok before. Earlier this year, the brand went viral for its Avant Guard silicone sheet mask , catering to Gen Z’s enthusiasm for sustainable skincare. 

Describing the Super Saturated serum as the “stickiest serum I have ever used,” TikTok creator  @sorayaskincares  took to the platform to review the product. 

“It is a barrier support serum that leaves your skin feeling so hydrated”, she shares. “I’ll be using this all winter long!”

As Soraya gives us the rundown, she includes close-up shots of the product’s unique and  gooey  texture, where her video has left many viewers intrigued. 

One user commented, “omg the texture 😍”

Another shared, “I need to try it, it is in my wish list ❤️❤️”

@sorayaskincares this is potentially the world’s stickiest serum 😰 #skincare #skin #skincareroutine #skincaretips #skincare101 #skintok #esthetician #hydration #serum #skincareproducts #beauty ♬ Roxanne – Instrumental – Califa Azul

@rollerskatingesthetician JORDYN10 for $$$ off ur SUPER SATURATED skin! 💦👽 30% glycerin concentrate serum by @Experiment for intense hydration, barrier support + skin relief. #experimentpartner #experimentwrld #estheticiantips #glycerin #hydratingserum #greenscreen ♬ original sound – JORDYN OAKLAND

In  @ericanic0le ‘s video on the product, she walks her audience through how to apply the serum – emphasising that it must be used on damp skin. 

“Humectants [like glycerin] are what draws water into your skin… to keep your skin nice and hydrated, but if there is no water for the humectant to bind to, then you are kinda defeating the process”, she explains. 

The Demise of Online Product Reviews: From Shady Influencer Practices to AI-Generated Content

@ericanic0le Have you been applying your serums incorrectly? So many brands produce hydrating serums but don’t instruct their users to apply on damp skin! Thank you @Experiment for properly instructing how to use a humectant based serum! Also Super Saturated has become a staple in my barrier repairing routine 😍 #skincaretips #skincare101 #skincareroutine #damagedskinbarrier #skinbarrier #skinbarrierrepair #hydratingserum #hydratedskin ♬ original sound – ERICA NICOLE | skin & beauty

The success of the Super Saturated serum has reignited discussion over the benefits of glycerin and Hyaluronic Acid, with many users debating which ingredient is most effective. 

In a video from last year,  @beauty.by.cait  broke down the differences between the two ingredients. 

“Generally speaking, the main difference between glycerin and hyaluronic acid is their molecular sizes. Glycerin has a smaller molecular size, which means it can penetrate deeper into your skin than hyaluronic acid,” she begins. “The only downside to glycerin-based products is that they can be a bit more tacky.”

@beauty.with.cait which one do you prefer? #glycerin #hyaulronicacid #humectants #chemengbeautytok #hydratedskin ♬ Buttercup – MixAndMash

@kezhaldashtitv Reply to @anna.705 #glycerinskincare #hyaluronicacidserum #skincarequestions #skincareanswers ♬ Sunrise – Official Sound Studio

@experimentwrld HA truly has nothing in her 🌝💦 #glycerin #barrierrepair #skinbarrier #skintok #hyaluronicacid #humectant ♬ hills remix Nicki Minaj – 𝕬𝖓𝖉𝖗𝖊𝖘

Check out Experiment’s Super Saturated Serum  here . 

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Experiment Super Saturated Barrier Support Concentrate Has One Very Important Thing Wrong With It

• Muse Approved

Experiment Super Saturated Barrier Support Concentrate ($28) a hydrating serum that contains 30% glycerin. Yes, you read that right! Let me say it again! 30% glycerin! Pretty cool right? It also contains polyglutamic acid, bisabolol, niacinamide, and prickly pear extract. The serum not only acts to keep you skin super hydrates but also, ensures you’re protecting your skin barrier’s support. This is especially helpful if you’ve done any damage to that barrier with the overuse of acids or exfoliating products.

I was recently offered a discount for reader’s of Musings of a Muse. If you want you can use that discount to get 10% off. The code is THEMUSE10. However, I want to fully disclose before I continue on with this review that I purchased this item with my own money. I think we’ve entered shady waters lately with reviews and I see a lot of dishonesty happening and I see a lot of consumers, readers, and followers pushing back at that. Below is my receipt for the purchase of this item. I learned about it via a Tiktok someone did and I went into my purchase very skeptical because I, myself, find it hard to believe anyone reviewing makeup or skincare lately. Experiment just recently extended a promo code to use on the blog and it’s very flattering because I really enjoy their products and I hope they do more in the future because the two they have are amazing. That being said, I have purchased everything from Experiment myself and nothing was gifted from the brand. I got my hands on Experiment Super Saturated Barrier Support Concentrate back in March and I’m on my second bottle of it and can’t wait for the restock happening June 13th (it’s been out of stock since March or so). I highly urge you to get on their mailing list to be alerted when it restocks as I’m not sure how quickly it will sell out.

Considering I’ve been using this for some months now, the discount coming into play, and the restock happening soon it seemed a good time to finally review Experiment Super Saturated Barrier Support Concentrate and share my thoughts on this formula and also, tell you about the biggest and most important problem with it.

Experiment Super Saturated Barrier Support Concentrate is $28 and offered in a 1.35 oz pump jar. That’s the biggest problem with this product. 1.35 oz? I need this to be offered in a 20 oz body lotion size. I need as much of as I can get. This is just TOO small. Please, hook me up with the supersize as soon as possible because this is solid gold skincare! A true skincare gem! Skincare at its finest!

With a base of water and 30% glycerin it will make you glide across the room once you applied it. And hey, if that wasn’t enough for you they throw in some squalane to make it even more hydrating. If you have drier skin you’re gonna want this. If you want plump, juicy skin you’re gonna want this. If you want to look younger with a brighter complexion you’re gonna want this. If you want that glazed donut look before you to bed at night you’re gonna want this. It’s amazing.

This is formulated with some incredible ingredients.

Ingredients: Water, Glycerin, Propanediol, Niacinamide, Diglycerin, Squalane, Polyacrylate Crosspolymer-6, Allantoin, Phenoxyethanol, Bisabolol, Sodium Polyacrylate, Methylparaben, Polyglutamic Acid, Tocopherol, Disodium EDTA, Opuntia Ficus-Indica Stem Extract, Malachite Extract, Ethylparaben, Caprylyl Glycol, Zingiber Officinale (Ginger) Root Extract.

With a high glycerin content this formula will hydrate your skin while improving your skin’s natural barrier and protecting it against skin irritants. Glycerin is already a very common ingredient found in a host of skincare this just goes a step further with it and you’re getting the glycerin on steroids amount in this serum. Glycerin, like Hyaluronic Acid, has the ability to pull water from the air to your skin providing more moisture not to mention it also, stays on your skincare for a long time which allows it to provide long term moisture. It’s also going to act to prevent your skin from losing moisture and allow. If you want bounce and plump use this and pop your favorite Hyaluronic Acid right on top and you’ll get plumped up plush skin instantly! But Glycerin isn’t the only goodness here…

You’re also getting the benefits of Niacinamide that boosts hydration, cams redness, and treats dark spots for a brighter smoother complexion. As well as squalane to add more moisture and Polyglutamic Acid that actually better than Hyaluronic Acid and holds up to 4000-5000 times its weight in moisture so on top of glycerin there’s a host of other incredible water retaining hydrators in this formula.

The serum has a thicker, gel-like consistency with no fragrance. When I got it I applied it the wrong way for the first three days and it failed to impressed me. I was stupidly applying it on my drier skin and was left feeling sticky and drier. For the best benefits you need to apply this on damp skin just like you would your favorite Hyaluronic Acid. I tend to apply it after I’ve cleansed my face and follow up with Hyaluronic Acid for even more plump. It feels a little sticky but absorbs pretty quickly and leaves skin feel refreshed, smoother, and well hydrated after that first application. I use it in conjunction with my Ialuset Hyaluronic Acid Cream . I’ll wash my face, apply the serum on my damp skin, and while my skin is still damp from the serum application I immediately go in with my Ialuset. Or I’ll cleanse, do a sheet mask, apply the serum after my sheet mask when my skin is still damp from the mask, and head in with my Ialuset and later on my night cream. If I’m doing acids or retinols on a different night this will pair up with either just fine. I’ll typing do my AHA first, wait a little while, do a little facial mist, and apply this on to and proceed with the rest of my routine like wise for retinol. Since using this my complexion is brighter, smoother, much more hydrated, and I get that awesome plush, plumped up bounciness that I’d typically get from my Hyaluronic Acid.

The hype you’re likely going to start hearing around Experiment Super Saturated Barrier Support Concentrate is true. It’s an excellent product and goes the extra mile to get your skin not only looking awesome but also, feeling awesome. This is a product that will be much beloved by drier skin women and men but also, anyone who just likes taking care of their skin in the evening and going that extra mile with skincare will adore this. I wouldn’t limit it to just dry skin users! I feel like a wide range of skin types should get on well with this.

Since buying Super Saturated Barrier Support Concentrate Experiment released a second product (yes, they only have two as well as a reusable mask) which is called Buffer Jelly . I purchased Buffer Jelly the day of launch and it has been just as impressive as Super Saturated. I highly recommend checking it out as well. It’s also in stock now. As much as I wish Experiment would start releasing more skincare I have to say that they excel at the two they have created so, by all means, take your time with any new creations over there because you’re killing it with these two!

Experiment Super Saturated Barrier Support Concentrate will be back in stock June 13th. I urge you to try out for yourself. Or if you have already do share your thoughts on it!

Where to buy

Isabella muse.

try using the super satty first. I normally put it on before my HA so my HA has damp skin to work with if that makes sense. I adore it! Can’t lie! This one is a keeper for me!

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[product question] has anyone tried the Experiment beauty Super Saturated serum?

Experiment Co-Founders on Science Beauty 2.0

In Part 1 of BeautyMatter’s conversation with Experiment ’s co-founder Lisa Guerrera, we covered the brand’s journey through inception, securing funding, and relaunch. As part of the brand’s continuing evolution, Guerrera and fellow co-founder Emmy Ketcham, both working as cosmetic chemists prior to launching the brand, have debuted the brand’s first serum.

Super Saturated is a serum—which also doubles as a mask treatment in conjunction with the brand’s reusable debut product, the Avant Guard silicon sheet mask—that boasts a 30% glycerin content for barrier support and intense hydration, supported by humectants such as polyglutamic acid and soothing ingredients like niacinamide,  prickly pear extract, and bisabolol. In a study of 30 people using the product, 96% immediately saw a boost in hydration, 97% felt skin-soothing effects, and 91% reported dewy-looking skin. After a month of use, 94% reported all-day hydration, skin feeling more soothed over time, and better skin resilience. 32% saw an improvement in the epidermis’s natural hydration levels. Packaged in a reusable pump container made of 40% recycled plastic, the serum produces 23% less carbon and 58% less waste than the average serum, Experiment reports.

BeautyMatter sat down with Guerrera and Ketcham to discuss the product’s launch journey, what makes a superstar ingredient, and the evolving nature of the hotly debated clean beauty category.

What was the journey of this product launch like and how does it factor into a pro-paraben narrative?

Lisa Guerrera: Super Saturated is the first-to-market formula that highlights glycerin as the main ingredient, which is pretty unique for a beauty product. Glycerin is the backbone of most of your hydrating skincare specifically, but it never really gets to be the star of the show. Not because it's not a wonderful ingredient and highly effective—it's actually one of the best humectants we have available to us, a dermatologist’s and chemist’s favorite for a reason.

But from a marketing perspective, glycerin is not the sexiest or coolest ingredient. Most marketers and beauty brands tend to want to latch on to novel, interesting ingredients that pull at consumers’ attention, so ingredients like hyaluronic acid or the newest, hottest plant extract. They'll attach claims to it and make a big story around it, but seldom do brands really use the backbone ingredients that are “boring” as the star of the show, simply because they feel like it's not going to pull at consumers’ attention.

The insight that Emmy [Ketcham] and I had when we started this development process is that glycerin is one of the best ingredients we have for hydration on the market, and at high amounts, it actually goes beyond hydration. It has barrier repair and irritation protection qualities at certain percentages, between 25% and 40%, where most brands are using it at below 5% or 10%. Pretty much nobody is going above that 10% mark simply because it's hard to formulate with and creates a tacky finish, which is the biggest no-no ever in formulation. But we wanted to show off glycerin’s unique hydration, barrier repair, and irritation protection qualities. Rebrand it to be this sexy cool ingredient that we think it deserves to be.

It’s paying off. We just launched and the numbers are great. Consumers are loving it. We're already getting amazing feedback, so that's awesome.

Emmy Ketcham: [With parabens] it's similar to choosing glycerin when we're formulating. A lot of brands start with storytelling and work forward from that, but we start with the science, the most efficacious ingredients that meet our goals, and then go from there. For preservation, parabens are the longest-used preservative in the history of pharmaceuticals and topical cosmetics. They have the longest amount of testing on irritation potential and safety data behind them. So especially for this product, because Super Saturated was also formulated to be used under Avant Guard, we knew that we wanted the preservation system to be really safe and gentle. Parabens were the best choice for that.

LG: Also, from a marketing perspective, I think consumers are actually ready to have more products with parabens. Overall the industry has canceled parabens out of fearful, reactionary reasons, and when you look at the trends on TikTok, Reddit, Instagram, the places where especially science-forward skincare trends are made, you see the tastemakers in the space—people with the largest audiences, hundreds of thousands of followers, dermatologists, chemists, subject-matter experts—talking about how parabens are fine, that we shouldn't be afraid of them and it's not something we should avoid. A lot more consumers are now more educated on that and know that if a brand is talking about being paraben-free, that's not always a good thing and something they should be looking for.

Moreover, there's more of a backlash coming around the overuse of “free from” terms, the overuse of fear-forward marketing tactics. So by using parabens, one of our broader missions is to fight misinformation. Making science cool allows consumers to tune out that misinformation and tune into the science. From a broader trends perspective, there is a lot of interesting stuff happening on social media in terms of the content that's being made around parabens, and clean beauty overall.

Whether it's retailers with clean guidelines or the misinformation on social media, it creates this situation where if you're pro-parabens or pro-sulfates, it causes an uproar because people haven't been fed the actual science on it, which has been under wraps from the industry for so many years. But it's really challenging for anyone that comes in with something that goes against that narrative.

LG: Especially when you talk about retailers, what's fascinating is to see the cycle that gets perpetuated. Consumers are fed some information, either from a viral video or a brand that might come onto the market and start saying this ingredient is actually not good, and they go through a whole marketing campaign to convince people that that's the truth. That gets embedded into the consumer logic, other brands follow suit, and that creates a vicious cycle. Then the retailers are usually the last on the train, where, depending on which retailer you talk to, they'll observe that trend and demand for more clean products without these specific ingredients. Nowhere in that cycle is there a checks and balances when it comes to the science of what's actually being said.

There's no regulation, especially in the US, on that marketing. We create a vicious cycle in beauty—whether it's true or not, it doesn't really matter because it'll sell products. That's kind of coming to a head. Sephora just got sued for their Clean at Sephora mark, so we're going to start seeing more litigation around clean and these kinds of labels.

Did you receive any kind of pushback, whether from consumers or investors, with this launch in terms of wanting to speak out against the fact that there are parabens in the product?

LG: Funnily enough, no. It’s kind of wild; it's not what I predicted at all. We’ve had one question, and it wasn't “Why are you using parabens?” They were just double-checking that these are the safe parabens. But we've gotten one question this whole time. We got more questions about niacinamide and how much we were using in the product than anything related to parabens, which is fascinating. Ultimately, it shows people are told that they need to care about this, but I don't think people care as much as clean beauty or these retailers would have you believe. People want efficacious products that they trust.

EK: It's also a representation of our target market, that we are attracting consumers that are interested in the science of skincare, and those consumers are generally more open to what is actually the truth versus what they've been marketed.

LG: They're usually following people like Lab Muffin Beauty Science, Charlotte Palermino, different dermatologists on TikTok and Instagram. There's been a lot of content in the last year that has teed up this product for success on both the parabens as well as the glycerin front.

I wanted to come back to glycerin because I'm curious why you think it's gone under the radar so much? It's obviously been around for a bit, hyaluronic acid and vitamin C as well. We go through phases where certain ingredients are sort of touted as the new, exciting thing, when they have existed for ages.

EK: A lot of times when a product is being developed by a brand, they'll create a brief, and highlight the active ingredients that they want. Usually they're looking for either a “new innovation” or to capitalize on a trend and a buzz that's already there. Glycerin has never checked either of those boxes. It doesn't sound sexy. It's one of those tried-and-true ingredients that people think of more as an excipient.

LG: To create buzz around an ingredient is a capital-intensive, team-intensive process that requires a ton of education and time invested in making that ingredient a success. Oftentimes on marketing teams, you don't have chemists around, people who have deep knowledge about the ingredients that you're marketing. They can ask the product team, but having people who actually understand the mechanics of an ingredient, how it works, why it's cool, why it was chosen, is actually really interesting and fundamental to the beauty marketing process.

Having that at Experiment, we're able to take an ingredient that might not seem very cool and make it cool, because we have so much more knowledge about the ingredient and why it's interesting. I think also for glycerin, yeah it has that tried-and-true quality, but it's not exactly the easiest ingredient to incorporate at higher amounts. We went through 46 different iterations of this product to get to this point. That's not a small feat.

EK: When we were creating Super Saturated, we knew that the number-one goal was to make the best hydrating serum on the market. We felt like a lot of the competitive products, they're really lightweight, quick absorbing, it feels like your skin is exactly the same as it was before. We wanted something that you put on and get instant relief and long-term barrier protection properties, so it's preventing dryness in the future.

Then we evaluated all of our options and chose the best ones, knowing that as chemists, we could tell that story no matter what the star ingredients were as long as they were efficacious. The efficacy is the story, not actually the star ingredients. It just so happens that we landed on glycerin.

It’s actually very interesting, glycerin [at a percentage] between zero and 10%, can be tacky. If you get above a certain level, you hit a valley where it's not tacky anymore. We were able to nail that sweet spot of efficacy while reducing the tackiness.

From concept to finish, how long of a product development process has it been?

LG: We started this in December of 2020.

"There's no regulation, especially in the US. We create a vicious cycle in beauty—whether it's true or not, it doesn't really matter because it'll sell products."

By lisa guerrera, co-founder, experiment.

Which also speaks to the fact that our industry is so driven by newness and this idea of perpetually churning out product, that sometimes that speed can be to its detriment. Sometimes everybody is just doing the same copy of the same thing that's proven to be a bestseller.

LG: It also goes back to who's in the marketing room? Who is the person that's making the decisions on, “It's going to be quicker for us to get to market if we use this ingredient that's already got some ooh-la-la power, it's going to be easier to attract consumers, so that's what we're going to do, even though ultimately, it's not actually what's going to work.” The product may still work but it's not usually because of that ingredient, it's because of some backbone ingredients that the chemist included on the back end that we're not talking about, like glycerin. Even niacinamide was in that camp for a long time until it got popular. What I've seen in the data, and believe intrinsically, is sometimes it takes a brand to make something cool, to make it a trend.

For example, we had a conversation with the data platform Spate around glycerin not being trendy right now, but hyaluronic acid is actually on a downturn. What does that mean for glycerin as a result, because there will be a hydrator that takes that place, right? When you look at the history, niacinamide used to be in a similar place. It used to be an ingredient that was very under the radar, something that chemists and dermatologists loved, but it was in the corners of Reddit and science-y skincare forums. Then The Ordinary came out with their 10% niacinamide serum. For better or worse, that's what made niacinamide so, so popular. A product like that brings an ingredient to the forefront, makes it cool, makes it interesting, makes it viral. That’s how these trends are kicked off sometimes, and then you've got the copycats beyond that.

Glycerin deserves that level of hype because it does so much that people don't even talk about. I’m excited to see an ingredient that deserves that spotlight hopefully get its day. We see a lot of dermatologists and subject-matter experts talking about this, so it’s going to be interesting to see how that develops.

Higher percentages doesn't always mean better, right? That's another common consumer misconception. How do you translate that formulation process to the consumer in a relatable way?

LG: There's definitely now a backlash towards high percentages of niacinamide. There are still people who love it, but a lot more are saying this is causing irritation or breakouts, which I've personally experienced. But we've included niacinamide in the serum, and one of the messages that we're putting out there is that we put it at low efficacious percentages. We're going to start seeing more gentle or lower-level formulations. Paula’s Choice just came out with a whole Calm line in collaboration with [skinfluencer] Gothamista where they use 1% salicylic acid instead of 2%. We'll see more products with this narrative of you don't need to use 10% glycolic acid to get a good result, sometimes less is more. KraveBeauty is another good example of the less-is-more approach.

The way you translate that to consumers is still talking through efficacy, while emphasizing that it's actually gentle. We've gotten so many questions on: “Can I use this with glycolic? Can I use this with this?” Consumers are really concerned about one wrong move and their skin is irritated, so having a series of products or messaging around your products where you have the freedom to experiment, that's how you message it to consumers.

EK: It’s also the increase of awareness around your skin barrier, having a strong healthy skin barrier actually prevents a lot of skin disorders from happening in the first place. When The Ordinary became popular, they did something great, which is increasing transparency and education around ingredients. But they also kicked off that “race to the top ingredient” trend, where more is always better. We had a lot of people who damaged their barriers and had to then go on a journey to figure out how to repair it. Now that we're over the hump of that ingredient craze, people are coming back to the basics and understanding that a simple, gentle, efficacious skincare routine that actually prioritizes having a healthy barrier is the way to healthy skin, versus just trying to nuke your skin.

LG: Not just the race to the top of ingredients but to having a 10-, 15-, 20-step skincare routine. I was talking with a few people and so many of them are like, “These kinds of brands where you have multiple different percentages of things are a little confusing.” It’s fun for the real in-the-weeds skincare person, but for the majority of consumers, that actually is overwhelming. Not to knock the success of those brands, they have paved the way in terms of educating consumers on ingredients. They've done a really great job at that. It's just that we get to a point where there's an oversaturation, too much consumption. We're seeing traction of that as well; it's not just gentle routines, it's also smaller routines.

One of our philosophies at Experiment is let's create products that are multi-use. We don't want you to have a 10-step routine, it's not always great for your skin. It works for some people, but not for a lot [of people] as well. It's a little bit counterintuitive, I guess, for a beauty brand in this late-stage capitalist environment to be preaching under-consumption, but it's definitely something where I see more brands pivoting towards, because of how overwhelmed consumers feel around the immense amount of skincare products that are being launched constantly.

I'm also curious—obviously, there's no way to track it—but how many bad skin reactions to products are actually due to that single product versus a bad interaction of that product with something else they might be using? And those really extensive skincare routines don't feel in spirit with the wider cultural shift around being more conscious consumers, but I know that’s not speaking for everyone.

LG: Everyone wants that simplicity. It comes in different ways for different people, but most people would ultimately like things to be easier when it comes to their routines.

EK: One of the issues with having a multi-step or single active ingredient profile product is figuring out how to create your routine. When The Ordinary first launched, as a chemist, I was so excited about it. What they're doing is so cool, the price point is great, so I would direct a lot of my friends there. But then they would have to come back to me and ask which one they are supposed to buy. And two, how do I use it? When do I incorporate this into my routine? Then you have so many products with so many different actives and they don't even know what to do with them.

LG: I've had the same experience with my friends as well. I would direct everyone to The Ordinary. That was the party line. And then they would come back—same story. There are whole Reddit threads about these different permutations of “How I put my Ordinary skincare routine together.” It is wildly complicated. It's like a whole algorithm that you have to go through in order to have a skincare routine. We're all tired societally, in the pandemic, we had that big skincare boom, but now we’re coming off that high, and people want that level of simplicity.

EK: And also, truly following the science kind of demands it. There is a limit to what skincare can do for your skin. Having 10 products is not going to increase the efficacy of your skincare routine much more than having two or three. Being able to recognize that and understand what products can actually do for your skin, how can we address those issues and ensure that the products that we're making are doing the best job of doing that?

LG: That's one of the reasons why the scientific influencer has emerged. People are looking for that more objective truth-to-power information around science and beauty. I gained a following on TikTok because I was talking about beauty science and saying “Hey, you actually don't need that,” or, “This doesn't actually work, don’t believe that.” People want to know what they're consuming, if what they're consuming is misinformation. We all have a little bit of a scarring from COVID in terms of how fast misinformation can spread and how damaging it really is.

Beauty is no different. Beauty is the gateway to a lot of health and wellness misinformation, unfortunately. It's really important that brands are more mindful of what they're saying, what they're spreading, and that's why we take that stuff very seriously here. One of the reasons we use parabens is because we're putting our money where our mouth is. The scientific influencer has actually changed the game in terms of what information consumers are looking for from brands. That's now given rise to a lot of science brands: ourselves, Stratia, Dieux—there's a lot of different brands that are now talking more objectively about the results you can see from products instead of warping that story and hyping it up too much.

"You'll hear [about] clean and sustainable like they're the same thing, but they’re not at all. The way you evaluate something for being clean and being sustainable have two completely different rubrics."

By emmy ketcham, co-founder, experiment.

We recently covered the Not So Pretty  documentary —it's wild how polarizing it is. A lot of clean beauty brands are built around this idea of parabens, sulfates, or whatever is all going to kill you. When cosmetic chemists come back with the hard facts, it threatens their business model.

LG: I'm so passionate about that. I totally agree, it does threaten their model.

EK: The interesting thing is though, internally, a lot of those brands know that what they're saying isn't true. I've actually interviewed at a clean beauty brand that has an internal talks team and got the opportunity to speak with their toxicologists during the interview process. We had a long conversation about how much we love parabens, but that brand doesn't use parabens, because it's part of the marketing story.

LG: I know so many founders who, they're my friends, they love the product, they fully believe what we're doing is a good thing, but they're too afraid themselves to do that because it does cut you off from retailers. It cuts you off from being in Credo. It cuts you off from these different retailers. Sephora will prioritize you last. There's lots of backlash. There's lots of constant business consequences to that choice, and it's not an easy one. But I think their success still being fueled by that misinformation, and that's something that's hard to come to terms with when you built your entire business on that, which is why I feel like, rather than trying to change all these businesses at once, you need new businesses to come in and set the standard for that.

Even when Dr. Shereene Idriss was developing her skincare line, she mentioned she was not going to include parabens but not because she thought they didn’t work. It's that the education side for the consumer is so difficult that she didn't want to have to deal with having to explain to people why parabens are actually good in the product.

LG: There are three brands, including us, on the market today that are using parabens. It is possible to have a successful, thriving brand with parabens. It's really about the level of honesty, efficacy, and hype that you create. It's us, Stratia continuously launches products with parabens in it, and they're increasing their market share. They just raised a $2 million round of funding . They're a cult skincare favorite, especially among the scientific beauty consumer. And then funny enough, Lush, a brand that you would never suspect would be having parabens in their products, uses them in nearly all of their products. Why? Because they use a lot of natural ingredients that will definitely go bad without parabens. But also, they've made statements on not taking parabens out. They’re basically like, do you want mold in your products or not? Because ultimately, parabens is the thing that's standing in the way of you getting a product that works and is safe for you. More people need to be aware of that, that it’s possible.

There’s this idea that it's not possible to have in this clean beauty environment. When we were fundraising, I was told that clean beauty is table stakes, and I'm like, “I will bet you $100 million it's not, because that is where the market is heading whether you believe it or not.” Investors are behind the curve on that. They're looking at trends. We're looking at far future trends. We're at boots on the ground, they're looking at it at a high level. Every step of the way, brands are being told that they can't have a successful brand without being clean. And I don't think that's true anymore.

EK: It's difficult too how clean beauty and natural beauty has been tied into sustainablity. You'll hear [about] clean and sustainable like they're the same thing, but they’re not at all. The way you evaluate something for being clean and being sustainable have two completely different rubrics.

LG: We preach a thoughtful, sustainable approach, which is around the idea that sustainable doesn't mean glass packaging, it means evaluating a product based on its carbon footprint, waste profile, supply chain, and understanding and trying to make changes to it that will reduce its waste and carbon footprint. We use Bluebird for that, which is almost akin to a clinical trial, double-checking that we're making the right decisions that are reducing our footprint overall. That is the future of sustainability: brands objectively measuring where they're at and making changes to reduce the number of carbon emissions and amount of waste they're putting into the environment. That doesn't mean simply switching to glass packaging and calling it a day. That doesn't mean using only clean ingredients that they then source all over the world and use a ton of agriculture to produce for no reason other than to say it's all plant-based. Synthetic doesn't mean bad, clean doesn't mean sustainable. There's so many kinds of different narratives that have wrapped itself into clean that it's become this indefinable thing that confuses a lot of consumers at the end of the day. That's ultimately why Sephora is facing a lawsuit on it, because they were not very clear. Nobody is very clear.

Also that need for that myth-debunking going all the way through the chain, through to the journalists writing about it and the consumers purchasing it. Even to the point about simpler routines, that's a great way to reduce your footprint, not producing so much in the first place.

LG: Stop producing so much product on the brand side and produce products that are better for the environment overall—do your best. Avant Guard, our first product, was a prime example of that. It replaces a single-use item, that's a clear winner. But when it comes to a serum, it's a little trickier to create a more sustainable serum. What does that really mean? That's why we had Bluebird [on hand] to benchmark it. For Experiment, we make a lot of effort to create products that actually fill a gap in the market, that actually fill a need.

EK: That's one way that innovation is driven for us. As a sustainable company, we have to strongly believe that anything we create is actually bringing something new to the market. It forces so much thoughtfulness at the beginning of the product development process.

LG: And that's not easy. A lot of brands with the pressures of the industry that we're in—investor, retail, and overall consumer pressure—it’s very hard for them to keep that intentionality. But there's definitely a few brands that we look to, like KraveBeauty. Press Reset Ventures is one of our investors for a reason, they are incredibly intentional about the products they put out, and I think we're going to see more places doing that.

What is the future of the “clean” beauty category?

LG: Frankly, it’s on the decline. I see VC firms changing their thesis to focus on scientific innovation in beauty rather than a focus on “clean.” This will change who becomes the market leaders of the future. Many consumers and brands are waking up and realizing “clean” means too many different things to be meaningful. They are realizing it’s ultimately misleading—I can only push for retailers to examine their ingredient policies to follow suit. The EU has banned the use of misleading marketing like “free from X” when that ingredient wouldn’t be harmful or be in that particular product to begin with, so this will shift brand strategies for sure.

I think brands will quiet on the “clean” rhetoric and shift to a new language to show consumers they care about the formulation and health— language like “transparent” and “conscious formulation”—and focus on using sustainability language.

Speaking to the future, what's coming down the pipeline?

LG: Honestly, we didn't predict that the serum would do so well, so we're very excited about that. There's a ton of word-of-mouth around it. We are definitely enjoying that success. Our goal is to push the serum as far and wide as possible, especially in conjunction with our mask. The serum is literally life-changing on its own, but with the mask, it's also a really amazing hydrating treatment.

We are coming out with more products, obviously, and we formulate our skin products in-house. Emmy is the formulator behind everything, which is also an unusual and interesting part of the brand as well because we have the ability to make unusual products that are a little bit more unexpected. For the future, expect the unexpected. Our whole tagline is “futuristic skin essentials” for a reason. We want to push the beauty industry forward in creating innovative products actually filling a gap in the market, that may be a little unusual but that all approach scientific beauty from a fun, future-minded perspective that engages consumers on both an efficacy and shareable, social media–friendly level.

We view ourselves as science-backed beauty 2.0. We talked a lot about The Ordinary, these brands that have come before us—CeraVe, Paula’s Choice—all amazing brands that have paved the way but I really consider them the 1.0 version of science beauty. We’re the next generation, which is not just looking at science from a black-and-white, lab coat, very serious perspective, but more so as a weird, interesting world that can be colorful and not take itself too seriously. The products that we come out with are really serious about results—we clinically test everything—but don't present themselves too seriously online, because that's more relatable and interesting to the consumer. You can get the best of both worlds and that's what we're building: a very fun, ridiculous, science-backed beauty world. That’s the future. People think this product is innovative, the next one, get out of town. It is very good. We're targeting a March 2023 launch for that, fingers crossed that the supply chain doesn't get us in 2023 like it did for pretty much every brand this past year. That's our New Year's resolution: fix the supply chain on our own and pave the way.

2 Article(s) Remaining

Motif: Replacing Trends with Science and Raising the Standards of Skincare

Sep. 21, 2023, beauty disruptor: heather widdows on our progression towards a global beauty ideal, may. 7, 2024, dibs beauty: the power of relatable beauty in the age of the aspirational, may. 9, 2023, beauty disruptor series: jessica defino on creating a new beauty narrative, mar. 31, 2022, made for melanin: 4.5.6 skin's mission to cater to forgotten skin prototypes, dec. 22, 2021, beauty disruptor series: saskia wilson-brown on open-access scent, sep. 1, 2022.

PRODUCT REVIEW

Experiment Super Saturated

Moisturizing, evens skin tone, anti-blemish, can it cause trouble.

• Irritation risk: medium
• Comodogenic risk ingredients: 0

Key actives

Cheaper alternatives.

Product summary

Based on the ingredient list, "Experiment - Super Saturated" can work well for skin moisturization. This moisturizer uses a good combo of humectants and emollients. These both types of ingredients are essentials for improving the skin hydration and keeping the skin barrier healthy. Humectants in this product (allantoin, diglycerin, glycerin, polyglutamic acid and caprylyl glycol) help to increase the water content in the upper layer of the skin. (These ingredients do so by "capturing" water molecules from the outside air or from within the deeper layers of the skin). Squalane and caprylyl glycol in this product help decrease the water evoporation from the skin, so that it stays hydrated for longer. These ingredients also soften the skin and take away the feeling of tightness and dryness.

Ingredient callouts

• We love that this moisturizer contains a good concentration of niacinamide 3.70% - 5.50%. Niacinamide is a perfect active in a moistruizer because it helps calm down inflamation in skin and support the skin barrier. More than that, it is helpful for most common skin concerns: it helps regulat oil production, help reduce acne and clogged pores, improve skin tone and prevent pigmentation marks. It also helps fight photodamage.
• In addition, this moisturizer contains Allantoin (1.20% - 1.80%). Allantoin is helpful in wound-healing and can help restore the skin barrier faster. It might also be able to improve scars, but the evidence is not very strong for this.

Irritation risk

There are some common irritants in this product, including ingredients that do not have benefits for the skin. We assess the overall irritancy of this moisturizer to be medium. For a detailed overview of all potential irritants: click here

You can see the detailed formula review with the breakdown of all actives in the product and the full ingredient list with estimated concentrations in the tables below.

What can the product work for?

What does the product description say.

Super Saturated

This product can help improve hydration of the skin with the two types of ingredients.

The first type is called “humectants”: these ingredients help attract water. When humectants are on the surface of the skin, they “pull in” the moisture from the outside environment, or from within deeper layers of the skin. The following ingredients in this product do the job: allantoin, diglycerin.

This product also contains ingredients called “occlusives”. They help reduce the speed with which our skin loses moisture to the outside environment. These ingredients also help soften the upper layer of the skin, so it feels less tight and nicer to the touch. The following ingredients in this product do the job: squalane, caprylyl glycol.

The following ingredients in this product are especially good for supporting the skin barrier and helping with the hydration level: niacinamide

This product can help reduce breakouts and clogged pores because it contains the following ingredient: niacinamide. This ingredient is used for treating acne and can have a noticeable effect.

This product can help reduce and prevent fine lines and wrinkles, improve skin elasticity and firmness because it contains niacinamide.

Keep in mind that it typically takes at least 6 weeks to notice any results because the changes that are needed to improve fine lines and elasticity happen in the deeper layers of the skin. No topical anti-aging product can “erase” wrinkles or fully reverse signs of aging.

This product can help reduce hypepigmentation and even out the skin tone because it contains the following effective ingredients: niacinamide

Keep in mind that you would need to apply any topical skincare targetted at hypigmentation consistently for a couple of months to get a result. No topical skincare product can help get rid of hyperpigmentation (including post-acne marks and age spots) instantly.

Honesty check

How honest is this product.

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N/A Retailers

• Overall product irritation risk
• Acne & comedogenic risk ingredients: 0

Potential irritants

Comodogenic ingredients, user reviews (4), similar products & dupes.

Ingredients & concentrations

All ingredients, key actives, ingredient list view.

Water, Glycerin, Propanediol, Niacinamide, Diglycerin, Squalane, Polyacrylate crosspolymer-6, Allantoin, Phenoxyethanol, Bisabolol, Sodium polyacrylate, Methylparaben, Polyglutamic acid, Tocopherol, Disodium edta, Opuntia ficus-indica stem extract, Malachite extract, Ethylparaben, Caprylyl glycol, Zingiber officinale root extract

• Glycerol and the skin: holistic approach to its origin and functions
• Niacinamide - mechanisms of action and its topical use in dermatology
• Gehring, W. (2004). Nicotinic acid/niacinamide and the skin. Journal of Cosmetic Dermatology, 3(2), 88–93. doi:10.1111/j.1473-2130.2004.00115.x
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EXCLUSIVE: TikTok-beloved Skin Care Brand Experiment World Closes $3.3 Million Seed Round

Experiment has closed a seed round, to the tune of $3.3 million.

The TikTok-native skin care brand, which sells directly on its website with four stock keeping units — a reusable sheet mask, a hydrating serum, an oil-gel hybrid and a lip balm — has amassed the funding to fuel team expansion, product development and marketing.

Greycroft, Katherine Power’s seed-to-growth-stage investment firm, led the round. Liah Yoo’s PressReset also participated, in addition to individual investors.

Lisa Guerrera, the brand’s cofounder, said the brand’s first turning point came with the launch of its second product: a hydrating facial serum called Super Saturated, which features 30 percent glycerin in the formula.

“We launched Super Saturated in November and that was a turning point for the brand, it became a hero product,” she said. “In February of 2023, we had an organic post from Mikayla Nogueira, who bought the product five days before, and she posted a video calling it the most hydrating serum in the world. We sold out of months’ worth of inventory in one month, which led to what I call the great Super Saturated drought of 2023.”

Following that, the product had a waitlist of more than 10,000 people. Industry sources say the brand’s first-year revenues surpassed $1 million. Guerrera didn’t comment on sales, but did note that the brand’s growth has been entirely organic with no paid advertising spend since the brand’s launch.

Guerrera credits her products’ efficacy, as well as unconventional formats and visual identities, for the success. For Super Saturated, for example, Guerrera’s goal was to take an unconventional approach to a common need. 

“All of the hyaluronic acid serums you see on the market are largely the same. Super Saturated comes in and glycerin is the star,” she said. “Every influencer was posting about the texture of the product, and it’s a visual attention grabber… our goal is to create these new, unexpected essentials for our consumer.”

Much of the seed round will bolster future product development in the brand’s in-house lab. “It allows us to be really creative. We look at the market, put our finger to the wind, and it’s part-taste, part-awareness of who your consumer is. For us, that’s 18 to 35 and very active in the skin care community.”

It will also go toward entering a new marketing chapter, as well as product development and hiring new team members. “We’re going into more expensive products to develop. We are supposed to eventually come out with sunscreen, for example. These things take time and a lot of money to do,” she said. “That investment is also going to marketing and we need to take this brand to new creative heights.”

“We’re excited about the differentiated brand Lisa and Emmy are building as chemists introducing clinically backed products to the market in a playful, engaging way,” said Alaina Hartley, principal, Greycroft. “Experiment’s organic growth — as evidenced by their five-figure waitlists and social virality — underscores the power of their early customer love. This is just the beginning for Experiment, and we’re thrilled to partner with them as they scale.”

Read the full article here

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Experiment Beauty Super Saturated

Ingredients overview, key ingredients.

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Other Ingredients

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Experiment Beauty Super Saturated Ingredients explained

Good old water, aka H2O. The most common skincare ingredient of all. You can usually find it right in the very first spot of the ingredient list, meaning it’s the biggest thing out of all the stuff that makes up the product. 

It’s mainly a solvent for ingredients that do not like to dissolve in oils but rather in water. 

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Once inside the skin, it hydrates, but not from the outside - putting pure water on the skin (hello long baths!) is drying. 

One more thing: the water used in cosmetics is purified and deionized (it means that almost all of the mineral ions inside it is removed). Like this, the products can stay more stable over time. 

• A natural moisturizer that’s also in our skin
• A super common, safe, effective and cheap molecule used for more than 50 years
• Not only a simple moisturizer but knows much more: keeps the skin lipids between our skin cells in a healthy (liquid crystal) state, protects against irritation, helps to restore barrier
• Effective from as low as 3% with even more benefits for dry skin at higher concentrations up to 20-40%
• High-glycerin moisturizers are awesome for treating severely dry skin

Propanediol is a natural alternative for the often used and often bad-mouthed propylene glycol . It's produced sustainably from corn sugar and it's Ecocert approved. 

It's quite a multi-tasker: can be used to improve skin moisturization , as a solvent , to boost preservative efficacy  or to influence the sensory properties of the end formula. 

• A multi-functional skincare superstar with several proven benefits for the skin
• Great anti-aging, wrinkle smoothing ingredient used at 4-5% concentration
• Fades brown spots alone or in combination with amino sugar, acetyl glucosamine
• Increases ceramide synthesis that results in a stronger, healthier skin barrier and better skin hydration
• Can help to improve several skin conditions including acne, rosacea, and atopic dermatitis

The big brother of glycerin . It's also a natural moisturizing factor that reduces water evaporation from the upper layer of the skin and helps to keep water in the skin so that it stays nicely hydrated .

Compared to glycerin, it has a larger molecular structure (kind of a double glycerin). Thanks to this, it penetrates slower into the skin but gives longer lasting moisture  and less sticky, better skin-feel .

It seems to us that squalane is in fashion and there is a reason for it. Chemically speaking, it is a saturated  (no double bonds) hydrocarbon (a molecule consisting only of carbon and hydrogen), meaning that it's a nice and stable oily liquid with a long shelf life. 

It occurs naturally in certain fish and plant oils (e.g. olive), and in the sebum (the oily stuff our skin produces) of the human skin . As f.c. puts it in his awesome blog post , squalane's main things are " emolliency , surface occlusion, and TEWL prevention all with extreme cosmetic elegance ". In other words, it's a superb moisturizer that makes your skin nice and smooth, without being heavy or greasy.

Another advantage of squalane is that it is pretty much compatible with all skin types and skin conditions . It is excellent for acne-prone skin and safe to use even if you have fungi-related skin issues, like seborrhea or fungal acne.

The unsaturated (with double bonds) and hence less stable version of Squal a ne is Squal e ne, you can read about it here >> 

It's a helper ingredient that helps to thicken up formulas and form a nice gel texture. It leaves a rich, elegant feel with a velvety finish on the skin and works over a wide pH range.

Super common soothing ingredient . It can be found naturally in the roots & leaves of the comfrey plant, but more often than not what's in the cosmetic products is produced synthetically. 

It's not only soothing but it' also skin-softening and protecting and can promote wound healing .

It’s pretty much the current IT- preservative . It’s safe and gentle , but even more importantly, it’s not a feared-by-everyone-mostly-without-scientific-reason paraben.

It’s not something new: it was introduced around 1950 and today it can be used up to 1% worldwide. It can be found in nature - in green tea - but the version used in cosmetics is synthetic. 

Other than having a good safety profile and being quite gentle to the skin it has some other advantages too. It can be used in many types of formulations as it has great thermal stability (can be heated up to 85°C) and works on a wide range of pH levels (ph 3-10). 

It’s often used together with ethylhexylglycerin as it nicely improves the preservative activity of phenoxyethanol.

It's one of the active part s of Chamomile that contains about 30% of bisabolol. It's a clear oily fluid that is used in skincare as a nice anti-inflammatory and soothing ingredient. 

A superabsorbent polymer (big molecule from repeated subunits) that has crazy water binding abilities. Sometimes its referred to as "waterlock" and can absorb 100 to 1000 times its mass in water. 

As for its use in cosmetic products, it is a handy multi-tasker that thickens up water-based formulas and also has some emulsifying and emulsion stabilizing properties. 

The most common type of feared-by-everyone-mostly-without-scientific-reason parabens . It's a cheap, effective and well-tolerated ingredient to make sure the cosmetic formula does not go wrong too soon . 

Apart from the general controversy around parabens (we wrote about it more here ), there is a 2006 in-vitro (made in the lab not on real people) research about methylparaben (MP) showing that when exposed to sunlight, MP treated skin cells suffered more harm than non-MP treated skin cells . The study was not done with real people on real skin but still - using a good sunscreen next to MP containing products is a good idea. (Well, in fact using a sunscreen is always a good idea. :))

A natural high-molecular weight amino acid polymer (big molecule from repeated subunits) that is claimed to have awesome, better than IT-moisturizer HA , skin hydrating properties . It is a film-forming polymer that improves both the moisture binding and retention properties of the skin.

• Primary fat-soluble antioxidant in our skin
• Significant photoprotection against UVB rays
• Vit C + Vit E work in synergy and provide great photoprotection
• Has emollient properties
• Easy to formulate, stable and relatively inexpensive

Super common little helper ingredient that  helps products to remain nice and stable for a longer time . It does so by neutralizing the metal ions in the formula (that usually get into there from water) that would otherwise cause some not so nice changes.

It is typically used in tiny amounts, around 0.1% or less.

The extract derived from Prickly Pear, a cactus native to Mexico. It is well-known for its soothing and hydrating properties . Read our shiny explanation about Opuntia Ficus-Indica here >>

A very common type of feared-by-everyone-mostly-without-scientific-reason paraben. It's a cheap, effective and well-tolerated ingredient to  make sure the cosmetic formula does not go wrong too soon. Read more about parabens here >>

It’s a handy multi-tasking ingredient that gives the skin a nice, soft feel . At the same time, it also boosts the effectiveness of other preservatives , such as the nowadays super commonly used phenoxyethanol . 

The blend of these two (caprylyl glycol + phenoxyethanol) is called Optiphen, which not only helps to keep your cosmetics free from nasty things for a long time but also gives a good feel to the finished product. It's a popular duo.

The extract coming from ginger , the lovely spice that we all know from the kitchen. It is also a medicinal plant used both in Chinese and Ayurvedic medicine for pretty much everything you can imagine (muscular pain, sore throat, nausea, fever or cramps,  just to give a few examples).

As for ginger and skincare, the root extract contains the biologically active component called gingerol  that has potent  antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties . Combined with Bisabolol ,  the duo works synergistically to sooth the skin and take down redness. 

Other than that, ginger also contains moisturizing polysaccharides, amino acids, and sugars , and it is also quite well known to increase blood circulation and have a toning effect.

Last but not least, Ginger also has some volatile, essential oil compounds (1-3%). Those are mostly present in ginger oil , but small amounts might be in the extract as well ( around 0.5% based on manufacturer info ). 

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A bottle of blood serum from the 1940s gives researchers hope to save lives on battlefields of the 2020s

To help the wounded soldiers of the Second World War, a Canadian lab freeze-dried and mass-produced plasma through innovate methods Canada would later abandon. These scientists want to pick up where they left off

At the trauma bay of St. Michael’s Hospital, Andrew Beckett and his team depend on fresh, clean blood products to treat severe injuries. Dr. Beckett set out to learn about the blood serum Canada made in the Second World War to see how it could improve transfusion medicine today. Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail

Andrew Beckett says he will never forget witnessing a Canadian soldier bleed to death during a United Nations peacekeeping mission in Croatia in 1994.

Dr. Beckett, who is director of trauma at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto , was a 24-year-old paramedic at the time. The solider he was attending to was a combat engineer, severely injured by a bouncing mine – a device that jumps up when triggered and explodes at waist height.

The soldier was evacuated for medical treatment and given an intravenous saline solution to maintain blood pressure and prevent shock. With no blood products on hand to replace what he was losing or to promote clotting, the soldier succumbed to his multiple wounds. “That always stuck with me,” Dr. Beckett said. “We were just giving him salt water.”

Dr. Beckett served in Croatia in the summer of 1994, during the violent upheaval after the breakup of Yugoslavia. Supplied

Decades later, with another war in Europe under way and geopolitical tensions rising elsewhere, Dr. Beckett worries that Canadians troops could find themselves in similarly dire circumstances if they are involved in an armed conflict.

“The ability for us to get blood products overseas is going to be critical to supporting our casualties, if it comes to that,” he said.

As a lieutenant-colonel with the Royal Canadian Medical Service, Dr. Beckett has been drawing on his own experience and on Canada’s wartime medical history in his efforts to improve the country’s preparedness for treating the wounded in future combat situations.

It’s a career-long quest that unexpectedly led him to a museum exhibit sample of freeze-dried blood serum that Canada produced during the Second World War.

In an experiment he describes as “a combination of transfusion medicine and Indiana Jones,” the historic material was reconstituted and analyzed in a laboratory at St. Michael’s last year to test its long-term stability.

“Even after 80 years the sample still showed activity,“ said Kanwal Singh, a scientist with Defence Research and Development Canada, who collaborated with Dr. Beckett on the project.

The result , published earlier this year in the British Journal of Haematology, reveals the robustness of an emergency treatment that is no longer in use by the Canadian military, but which was a mainstay of battlefield medicine during the Second World War.

Kanwal Singh from Defence Research and Development Canada helped Dr. Beckett take freeze-dried plasma from 1943, which this empty bottle once contained, and see how well it had held up over time. Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail

Back then, at a time when the population of Canada numbered only 11.5 million, 2.5 million individual blood donations were made to the Canadian Red Cross in support of a public campaign dubbed “Blood for the Wounded.”

That blood became the basis for the production of 400,000 bottles of freeze-dried blood serum in Toronto under the supervision of insulin codiscoverer Charles Best. An additional 30,000 bottles was produced at the University of Montreal.

The product was made by putting whole blood through a centrifuge to separate out red blood cells, platelets and proteins known as clotting factors.

What remains is blood serum, a yellowish fluid containing additional proteins, such as albumin and other beneficial constituents. When the clotting factors are not removed, the result is blood plasma.

Both serum and plasma can be freeze-dried – or lyophilized – to remove its water content. This enables long-term storage and easy transportation.

“What you’re left with is a powder,” said Dr. Singh. “Essentially, it’s like whey protein.”

Connaught's equipment could separate the red cells from donor blood, leaving serum and plasma that could be freeze-dried for later use. Sanofi Toronto Archives

According to Roderick Bailey, a medical historian and research fellow at the University of Oxford, about 109,000 of the bottles of the freeze-dried serum made it to Canadian and British forces on the front lines during the war, where they proved invaluable.

Unlike whole blood, which has a limited shelf-life and requires refrigeration, freeze-dried blood products – serum or plasma – can be stored at room temperature for longer periods of time and then reconstituted simply by adding water.

It was therefore ideal for forces without ready access to medical support, like those involved in the airborne and amphibious assaults that occurred during and after D-Day.

“You’ve got your bottle of distilled water and you’ve got your dried blood product. Neither needs to be in the fridge. So it’s easy. It’s quick,” Dr. Bailey said.

The method, used effectively during the Second World War, can help keep injured soldiers alive while they are transported away from danger to a place where there are supplies of whole blood or available donors.

In other words, said Dr. Singh, the freeze-dried blood product “bridges to whole blood and whole blood bridges to surgery.”

Red Cross blood clinics got millions of Canadians to donate during the war years, but the spread of hepatitis raised concerns about how to protect recipients from tainted supply. Sanofi Toronto Archives

So why would a system that proved so successful 80 years ago no longer be in use by the Canadian military today?

A key part of the answer is the risk of contamination that comes with pooling donated blood, which was common at that time. Toward the end of the war it became increasingly apparent that some recipients were developing viral hepatitis. By the 1950s military use of freeze-dried serum had ceased in Canada.

The need also diminished. After the Korean War, Canadian troops were less likely to find themselves wounded in combat without access to blood or the possibility of an airlift. In addition, freeze-dried blood plasma, now regarded as preferable to blood serum, can be purchased from international suppliers should the need arise.

But for years Dr. Beckett has advocated that Canada resume producing freeze-dried blood products as a secure supply for its armed forces, taking advantage of modern screening methods to avoid contamination. Starting in 2014, he began working with Canadian Blood Services on the development of a prototype product – a freeze-dried blood plasma rather than serum, in order to provide more clotting power to staunch wounds.

The war in Ukraine has created high demand for products to treat wounded soldiers, like this one at a stabilization centre in Donetsk. ROMAN PILIPEY/AFP via Getty Images

Since then, reasons for moving ahead with the idea have only grown, he said.

One is the changing nature of the battlefield, as demonstrated by the war in Ukraine . That conflict features higher casualties and new threats such as drones, which were not a factor when Canadian soldiers were active in Afghanistan a decade ago.

Another reason became clear during the COVID-19 pandemic: At times of global crisis, countries who rely solely on international sources for their crucial medical supplies are vulnerable.

“Having a domestic product available would give us some buffer against the shocks that could come,” Dr. Beckett said.

Beyond the military, a made-in-Canada freeze-dried blood product could also be useful for emergency responders serving remote areas across the country, he added.

Dr. Beckett's research focused on the Connaught lab's work under Charles Best, left, who co-discovered insulin with Frederick Banting, right. The Globe and Mail

It was Dr. Beckett’s interest in advancing this project that led him, a few years ago, to delve into the history of Canada’s wartime production of freeze-dried serum led by Charles Best.

The role was one that Best was well prepared to take on at the time by virtue of his previous experience.

“That’s essentially what he did for the first insulin factory, in 1923,” said Christopher Rutty, a Toronto-based public health historian. “He ran the show.”

As with insulin in its early days, Connaught Laboratories in Toronto became the production site for the freeze-dried serum. A public entity at that time, Connaught was later privatized in the 1980s and its scientific legacy now resides with the multinational pharmaceutical company Sanofi.

In the course of researching the story, Dr. Beckett came across a photo of a museum-style display cabinet located at Sanofi’s Toronto facility. Within the display, he could see what appeared to be a bottle of the original 1940s-era blood product. Here, he realized, was an opportunity to test something he had long been curious about: how long could freeze-dried serum hold up?

Opening up this 80-year-old bottle from the Sanofi collection was 'like stepping back in time,' Dr. Beckett says. Supplied by Christopher Rutty

To explore the possibility, he tracked down Dr. Rutty, who serves as resident historian and manager of the Sanofi Toronto archives. Then the pandemic hit and the idea was temporarily shelved. Finally, last year, Dr. Beckett was able to get access to one of a few bottles of the freeze-dried serum that Sanofi has in its collection.

“It was like stepping back in time,” said Dr. Beckett, describing the moment when the 80-year-old bottle was cracked open in the laboratory. “We knew we would be able to use some of the product to illuminate Best’s, the Canadian Red Cross and Connaught Lab’s great contribution to transfusion and Canadian military efforts in World War II.”

For the test, he and Dr. Singh added sterile water to the freeze-dried serum, first produced and bottled in 1943. They also prepared fresh blood serum from the pooled, donated blood of 10 people to act as a control.

The 80-year-old serum produced a large amount of solid proteins that precipitated out of the solution and could be removed. What was left was a liquid that still contained most of the same constituents as fresh serum, though in lower quantities.

The sample was also found to contain small quantities of DNA of the Hepatitis B virus. This was a clear reminder of the original problem with using pooled blood in the 1940s. It’s not known if the serum would still cause an infection after so many years, Dr. Singh said, but the results do not rule out the possibility.

Nevertheless, the reconstituted serum “still retained its original purpose,” as a means of expanding volume in the blood stream during trauma while helping maintain the body’s response to injury, the researchers reported in their study.

Canadian Blood Services is developing its own freeze-dried plasma, and Dr. Beckett's team had an old enough sample to see what would happen if it were reconstituted. Jeff McIntosh/The Canadian Press

In another part of the experiment, they also reconstituted a four-year-old sample of the prototype freeze-dried plasma under development by Canadian Blood Services. This proved comparable in performance to a fresh frozen plasma preparation.

The results indicate that the freeze-dried plasma, if produced in Canada, can be successfully stockpiled and deployed as needed by the military.

The Department of National Defence and Veterans Affairs Canada recently approved a new round of funding for Canadian Blood Services to continue working on freeze-dried plasma, with the goal of testing its product in a future clinical trial.

“It’s been a torturous journey, but I think we are moving in the right direction now and will be able to get a freeze-dried plasma product into the hands of Canadian clinicians to benefit all patients, whether military or civilian,” Dr. Beckett said.

The outcome may serve to revive another feature of Canada’s relationship to its military that was present during the Second World War, when the practice of donating blood carried emotional resonance beyond its medical importance.

“It’s the tie between the home front and the soldiers fighting,” Dr. Beckett said. “There’s tremendous psychological impact in being able to resuscitate casualties with blood.”

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Climate solution: Massachusetts town experiments with community heating and cooling

FILE - Groundwater squirts up during drilling for a geothermal heating and cooling system at a home in White Plains, N.Y., May 8, 2023. A community in Framingham, Mass., will soon become one of the first in the U.S. to be heated with geothermal connected to each other. (AP Photo/Julia Nikhinson, File)

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Jennifer and Eric Mauchan live in a Cape Cod-style house in Framingham, Massachusetts that they’ve been cooling with five air conditioners. In the summer, the electric bill for the 2,600-square-foot home can be $200.

In the winter, heating with natural gas is often more than $300 a month, even with the temperature set at 65 degrees Fahrenheit (18 degrees Celsius).

“My mom, when she was alive, wouldn’t come to our house in the wintertime,” because it was too cold, Eric Mauchan said.

But beginning Tuesday, their neighborhood will be part of a pilot climate solution that connects 37 homes and businesses with a highly-efficient, underground heating and cooling system. Even taking into account that several of the buildings will be switching from natural gas to electricity, people are expected to see their electric bills drop by 20% on average. It’s a model some experts say can be scaled up and replicated elsewhere.

“As soon as they told me about it, I bought in 100%,” said Jennifer Mauchan, who works in finance, remembering her first meeting with representatives from Eversource, the gas and electric utility that installed the system. “From a financial perspective, I thought that it was a very viable option for us.” She cited lower greenhouse gases that cause climate change as an important factor in the decision.

Gina Richard, owner of Corner Cabinet, a kitchen and bath cabinet showroom in Framingham, said she felt “pretty lucky” to be part of the project. She currently uses two air conditioners and two heaters and looks forward to replacing all that with a single system. Richard said she was told she could see her winter heating bill of $900-1,000 go down by as much as a third, which she said would be “amazing.”

The Framingham system consists of a giant underground loop filled with water and antifreeze , similar to the way gas is delivered to several houses in a neighborhood. Water in the loop absorbs heat from underground, which remains at about 55 degrees Fahrenheit (13 degrees Celsius) all year.

Households have their own heat pump units that provide heating and air conditioning, installed by the utility. These take heat from the loop, spike the temperature further, and release that heat as warm air into the homes. For air conditioning, heat is extracted from the home or business and released into the Earth or transported to the next home.

The energy sharing works best when some buildings are drawing on heat while another needs it, the way a grocery store needs to keep its cases refrigerated even in winter.

Other networked geothermal projects exist in the U.S., including the Texas community of Whisper Valley and Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. Eversource says this is the first utility-led installation in the U.S. If it works, that could be important because an individual homeowner could not do the digging and drilling necessary to create a neighborhood system.

Right now, homeowners can buy individual air source heat pumps, which have become common and are efficient. Or they can drill for more expensive, even more efficient ground source heat pumps . Incentives, such as those in the Inflation Reduction Act or local utilities, help lower the price on these, yet the final cost can still be tens of thousands of dollars.

Framingham beat out other communities that applied to Eversource to become pilot sites. The city 20 minutes west of Boston is surrounded by Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, plus firms like Thermo Fisher Scientific, Pfizer and Novartis. Eric Mauchan said the proximity of so much advanced technology and a state law requiring that greenhouse gas emissions ramp down to zero by 2050 helped make the community receptive.

Nikki Bruno, vice president for clean technologies for Eversource, also cited the state’s emissions law as a reason for the pilot. It was also “an opportunity from a decarbonization standpoint,” she said, because Eversource has its own net zero goal.

“We’re thinking about, okay, we do this pilot now, how can we scale this into a sustainable business model, into a sustainable program to offer in more locations?” she said.

Jack DiEnna, founder of the Geothermal National & International Initiative, an alliance of industry professionals, said utilities are seeing pressure to address climate change plus incentives to do so. Ground source heat pumps are highly efficient, reduce the electricity demand on the grid and can be installed in regions beyond the reach of gas lines. They also cool homes and release very little in the way of climate pollution compared to traditional heaters and air conditioners.

There is also an equity issue that concerns some in the climate and energy sector. If people who have the means disconnect their natural gas, it could have unequal consequences for people.

It “means that the people who can least afford it are stuck paying for this gas system, this very leaky gas system,” said Ania Camargo, thermal energy networks manager at the Building Decarbonization Coalition, a nonprofit working to eliminate fossil fuels from buildings.

“One of the reasons why I advocate for utilities to be a big part of the solution is because it’s a way to make sure we can do this for everybody.”

Back at the Mauchans’ home, the couple laughs about the accommodations they were making to their old heating system. “I was so mindful of the expense that we would incur if we increased the temperature to, God forbid, 70 degrees in the winter,” Jennifer recalled about letting the house get cold in winter.

They expect their new heat pump to change things. “I mean, we’ll keep our house 71 degrees all year long,” Eric said.

The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org .

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Warming Is Getting Worse. So They Just Tested a Way to Deflect the Sun.

A spraying machine designed for cloud brightening on the flight deck of the Hornet, a decommissioned aircraft carrier that is now a museum in Alameda, Calif. Credit...

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By Christopher Flavelle

Photographs by Ian C. Bates

Christopher Flavelle reported from a decommissioned aircraft carrier in Alameda, Calif. He spoke with scientists, environmentalists and government officials.

• April 2, 2024

A little before 9 a.m. on Tuesday, an engineer named Matthew Gallelli crouched on the deck of a decommissioned aircraft carrier in San Francisco Bay, pulled on a pair of ear protectors, and flipped a switch.

A few seconds later, a device resembling a snow maker began to rumble, then produced a great and deafening hiss. A fine mist of tiny aerosol particles shot from its mouth, traveling hundreds of feet through the air.

It was the first outdoor test in the United States of technology designed to brighten clouds and bounce some of the sun’s rays back into space, a way of temporarily cooling a planet that is now dangerously overheating. The scientists wanted to see whether the machine that took years to create could consistently spray the right size salt aerosols through the open air, outside of a lab.

If it works, the next stage would be to aim at the heavens and try to change the composition of clouds above the Earth’s oceans.

As humans continue to burn fossil fuels and pump increasing amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the goal of holding global warming to a relatively safe level, 1.5 degrees Celsius compared with preindustrial times, is slipping away. That has pushed the idea of deliberately intervening in climate systems closer to reality.

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A brief, weird history of brainwashing

L. Ron Hubbard, Operation Midnight Climax, and stochastic terrorism—the race for mind control changed America forever.

• Annalee Newitz archive page

On an early spring day in 1959, Edward Hunter testified before a US Senate subcommittee investigating “the effect of Red China Communes on the United States.” It was the kind of opportunity he relished. A war correspondent who had spent considerable time in Asia, Hunter had achieved brief media stardom in 1951 after his book Brain-Washing in Red China introduced a new concept to the American public: a supposedly scientific system for changing people’s minds, even making them love things they once hated. 

But Hunter wasn’t just a reporter, objectively chronicling conditions in China. As he told the assembled senators, he was also an anticommunist activist who served as a propagandist for the OSS, or Office of Strategic Services—something that was considered normal and patriotic at the time. His reporting blurred the line between fact and political mythology.

When a senator asked about Hunter’s work for the OSS, the operative boasted that he was the first to “discover the technique of mind-attack” in mainland China, the first to use the word “brainwashing” in writing in any language, and “the first, except for the Chinese, to use the word in speech in any language.” 

None of this was true. Other operatives associated with the OSS had used the word in reports before Hunter published articles about it. More important, as the Chinese University of Hong Kong legal scholar Ryan Mitchell has pointed out , the Chinese word Hunter used at the hearing— xinao (洗脑), translated as “wash brain”—has a long history going back to scientifically minded Chinese philosophers of the late 19th century, who used it to mean something more akin to enlightenment. 

Yet Hunter’s sensational tales still became an important part of the disinformation and pseudoscience that fueled a “mind-control race” during the Cold War, much like the space race. Inspired by new studies on brain function, the US military and intelligence communities prepared themselves for a psychic war with the Soviet Union and China by spending millions of dollars on research into manipulating the human brain. But while the science never exactly panned out, residual beliefs fostered by this bizarre conflict continue to play a role in ideological and scientific debates to this day.

Coercive persuasion and pseudoscience

Ironically, “brainwashing” was not a widely used term among communists in China. The word xinao , Mitchell told me in an email, is actually a play on an older word, xixin , or washing the heart, which alludes to a Confucian and Buddhist ideal of self-awareness. In the late 1800s, Chinese reformists such as Liang Qichao began using xinao —replacing the character for “heart” with “brain”—in part because they were trying to modernize Chinese philosophy. “They were eager to receive and internalize as much as they could of Western science in general, and discourse about the brain as the seat of consciousness was just one aspect of that set of imported ideas,” Mitchell said. 

For Liang and his circle, brainwashing wasn’t some kind of mind-wiping process. “It was a sort of notion of epistemic virtue,” Mitchell said, “or a personal duty to make oneself modern in order to behave properly in the modern world.”

Meanwhile, scientists outside China were investigating “brainwashing” in the sense we usually think of, with experiments into mind clearing and reprogramming. Some of the earliest research into the possibility began in the 1890s, when Ivan Pavlov, the Russian physiologist who had famously conditioned dogs to drool at the sound of a bell, worked on government-funded projects to investigate how trauma could change animal behavior. He found that even the most well-conditioned dogs would forget their training after intensely stressful experiences such as nearly drowning, especially when those were combined with sleep deprivation and isolation. It seemed that Pavlov had hit upon a quick way to wipe animals’ memories. Scientists on both sides of the Iron Curtain subsequently wondered whether it might work on humans. And once memories were wiped, they wondered, could something else be installed their place? 

During the 1949 show trial of the Hungarian anticommunist József Mindszenty, American officials worried that the Russians might have found the answer. A Catholic cardinal, Mindszenty had protested several government policies of the newly formed, Soviet-backed Hungarian People’s Republic. He was arrested and tortured, and he eventually made a series of outlandish confessions at trial: that he had conspired to steal the Hungarian crown jewels, start World War III, and make himself ruler of the world. In his book Dark Persuasion , Joel Dimsdale, a psychiatry professor at the University of California, San Diego, argues that the US intelligence community saw these implausible claims as confirmation that the Soviets had made some kind of scientific breakthrough that allowed them to control the human mind through coercive persuasion.

This question became more urgent when, in 1953, a handful of American POWs in China and Korea switched sides, and a Marine named Frank Schwable was quoted on Chinese radio validating the communist claim that the US was testing germ warfare in Asia. By this time, Hunter had already published a book about brainwashing in China, so the Western public quickly gravitated toward his explanation that the prisoners had been brainwashed, just like Mindszenty. People were terrified, and this was a reassuring explanation for how nice American GIs could go Red. 

Over the following years, in the wake of the Korean War, “brainwashing” grew into a catchall explanation for any kind of radical or nonconformist behavior in the United States. Social scientists and politicians alike latched onto the idea. The Dutch psychologist Joost Meerloo warned that television was a brainwashing machine, for example, and the anticommunist educator J. Merrill Root claimed that high schools brainwashed kids into being weak-willed and vulnerable to communist influence. Meanwhile, popular movies like 1962’s The Manchurian Candidate , starring Frank Sinatra, offered thrilling tales of Chinese communists whose advanced psychological techniques turned unsuspecting American POWs into assassins. 

For the military and intelligence communities, mind control hovered between myth and science. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the peculiar case of an anonymously published 1955 pamphlet called Brain-Washing: A Synthesis of the Russian Textbook on Psychopolitics , which purported to be a translation of work by the Soviet secret-police chief Lavrentiy Beria. Full of wild claims about how the Soviets used psychology and drugs to control the masses, the pamphlet has a peculiar section devoted to the ways that Dianetics—a pseudoscience invented by the founder of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard—could prevent brainwashing. As a result, it is widely believed that Hubbard himself wrote the pamphlet as black propaganda, or propaganda that masquerades as something produced by a foreign adversary. 

Still, US officials apparently took it seriously. David Seed, a cultural studies scholar at the University of Liverpool, plumbed the National Security Council papers at the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, where he discovered that the NSC’s Operations Coordinating Board had analyzed the pamphlet as part of an investigation into enemy capabilities. A member of the board wrote that it might be “fake” but contained so much accurate information that it was clearly written by “experts.” When it came to brainwashing, government operatives made almost no distinction between black propaganda and so-called expertise.

This gobbledygook may also have struck the NSC investigator as legitimate because Hubbard borrowed lingo from the same sources as many scientists of the era. Hubbard chose the name Dianetics, for instance, specifically to evoke the computer scientist Norbert Wiener’s idea of cybernetics, an influential theory about information control systems that heavily informed both psychology and the burgeoning field of artificial intelligence. Cybernetics suggested that the brain functioned like a machine, with inputs and outputs, feedback and control. And if machines could be optimized, then why not brains?

An excuse for government abuse 

The fantasy of brainwashing was always one of optimization. Military experts knew that adversaries could be broken with torture, but it took months and was often a violent, messy process. A fast, scientifically informed interrogation method would save time and could potentially be deployed on a mass scale. In 1953, that dream led the CIA to invest millions of dollars in MK-Ultra, a project that injected cash into university and research programs devoted to memory wiping, mind control, and “truth serum” drugs. Worried that their rivals in the Soviet Union and China were controlling people’s minds to spread communism throughout the world, the intelligence community was willing to try almost anything to fight back. No operation was too weird. 

One of MK-Ultra’s most notorious projects was “Operation Midnight Climax” in San Francisco, where sex workers lured random American men to a safe house and dosed them with LSD while CIA agents covertly observed their behavior. At McGill University in Montreal, the CIA funded the work of the psychologist Donald Cameron, who used a combination of drugs and electroconvulsive therapy on patients with mental illness, attempting to erase and “repattern” their minds. Though many of his victims did wind up suffering from amnesia for years , Cameron never successfully injected new thoughts or memories. Marcia Holmes, a science historian who researched brainwashing for the Hidden Persuaders project at Birkbeck, University of London, told me that the CIA used Cameron’s data to develop new kinds of torture, which the US adopted as  “enhanced interrogation” techniques in the wake of 9/11. “You could put a scientific spin on it and claim that’s why it worked,” she said. “But it always boiled down to medieval tactics that people knew from experience worked.”

MK-Ultra remained secret until the mid-1970s, when the US Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, commonly known as the Church Committee after its chair, Senator Frank Church, opened hearings into the long-­running project. The shocking revelations that the CIA was drugging American citizens and paying for the torment of vulnerable Canadians changed the public’s understanding of mind control. “Brainwashing” came to seem less like a legitimate threat from overseas enemies and more like a ruse or excuse for almost any kind of bad behavior. When Patty Hearst, granddaughter of the newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst, was put on trial in 1976 for robbing a bank after being kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army, an American militant organization, the judge refused to believe experts who testified that she had been tortured and brainwashed by her captors. She was convicted and spent 22 months in jail. This marked the end of the nation’s infatuation with brainwashing, and experts began to debunk the idea that there was a scientific basis for mind control.

Still, the revelations about MK-Ultra led to new cultural myths. Communists were no longer the baddies—instead, people feared that the US government was trying to experiment on its citizens. Soon after the Church Committee hearings were over, the media was gripped by a crime story of epic proportions: nearly two dozen Black children had been murdered in Atlanta, and the police had no leads other than a vague idea that maybe it could be a serial killer. Wayne Williams, a Black man who was eventually convicted of two of the murders, claimed at various points that he had been trained by the CIA. This led to popular conspiracy theories that MK-Ultra had been experimenting on Black people in Atlanta.

Colin Dickey, author of Under the Eye of Power: How Fear of Secret Societies Shapes American Democracy , told me these conspiracy theories became “a way of making sense of an otherwise mystifying and terrifying reality, [which is that America is] a country where Black people are so disenfranchised that their murders aren’t noticed.” Dickey added that this MK-Ultra conspiracy theory “gave a shape to systemic racism,” placing blame for the Atlanta child murders on the US government. In the process, it also suggested that Black people had been brainwashed to kill each other. 

No evidence ever surfaced that MK-Ultra was behind the children’s deaths, but the idea of brainwashing continues to be a powerful metaphor for the effects of systemic racism. It haunts contemporary Black horror films like Get Out , where white people take over Black people’s bodies through a fantastical version of hypnosis. And it provides the analytical substrate for the scathing indictment of racist marketing in the book Brainwashed: Challenging the Myth of Black Inferiority , by the Black advertising executive Tom Burrell. He argues that advertising has systematically pushed stereotypes of Black people as second-class citizens, instilling a “slave mindset” in Black audiences.

A social and political phenomenon

Today, even as the idea of brainwashing is often dismissed as pseudoscience, Americans are still spellbound by the idea that people we disagree with have been psychologically captured by our enemies. Right-wing pundits and politicians often attribute discussions of racism to infections by a “woke mind virus”—an idea that is a direct descendant of Cold War panics over communist brainwashing. Meanwhile, contemporary psychology researchers like UCSD’s Dimsdale fear that social media is now a vector for coercive persuasion, just as Meerloo worried about television’s mind-control powers in the 1950s. 

Cutting-edge technology is also altering how we think about mind control. In a 2017 open letter published in Nature , an international group of researchers and ethicists warned that neurotechnologies like brain-computer interfaces “mean that we are on a path to a world in which it will be possible to decode people’s mental processes and directly manipulate the brain mechanisms underlying their intentions, emotions and decisions.” It sounds like MK-Ultra’s wish list. Hoping to head off a neuro-dystopia, the group outlined several key ways that companies and universities could guard against coercive uses of this technology in the future. They suggested that we need laws to prevent companies from spying on people’s private thoughts, for example, as well as regulations that bar anyone from using brain implants to change people’s personalities or make them more neurotypical. 

Many neuroscientists feel that these concerns are overblown; one of them, the University of Maryland cognitive scientist R. Douglas Fields, summed up the naysayers’ position with a column in Quanta magazine arguing that the brain is more plastic than we realize, and that neurotech mind control will never be as simple as throwing a switch. Kathleen Taylor, another neuroscientist who studies brainwashing, takes a more measured view; in her book Brainwashing: The Science of Thought Control , she acknowledges that neurotech and drugs could change people’s thought processes but ultimately concludes that “brainwashing is above all a social and political phenomenon.” 

Perhaps that means the anonymous National Security Council examiner was right to call Hubbard’s black propaganda the work of an “expert.” If brainwashing is politics, then disinformation might be as effective (or ineffective) as a brain implant in changing someone’s mind. Still, scholars have learned that political efforts at mind control do not have predictable results. Online disinformation leads to what Juliette Kayyem, a former assistant secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, identifies as stochastic terrorism , or acts of violence that cannot be predicted precisely but can be analyzed statistically. She writes that stochastic terrorism is inspired by online rhetoric that demonizes groups of people, but it’s hard to know which people consuming that rhetoric will actually become terrorists, and which of them will just rage at their computer screens—the result of coercive persuasion that works on some targets and misses others. 

American operatives may never have found the perfect system for brainwashing foreign adversaries or unsuspecting citizens, but the US managed to win the mind-control wars in one small way. Mitchell, the legal scholar at Hong Kong University, told me that the American definition of brainwashing, or xinao , is now the dominant way the word is used in modern Chinese speech. “People refer to aggressive advertising campaigns or earworm pop songs as having a xinao effect,” he said. The Chinese government, Mitchell added, uses the term exactly the way the US military did back in the 1950s. State media, for example, “described many Hong Kong protesters in 2019 as having undergone xinao by the West.”

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