In the March, 2007 issue of the British Journal of Dermatology (Volume 156, Issue 3, pages 433-439), a study is reported which, based on experiments with cultured cells, concludes that the actual working mechanism of DMAE, or 2-dimethylaminoethanol, the popular anti-wrinkle ingredient in such skin-care lines as N.V. Perricone’s, “involves a vacuolar cytopathology.” Researchers Morisette, Germain and Marceau found that to visibly reduce lines and wrinkles, DMAE swells cells by creating a large number of vacuoles inside them. The swelling of each cell to accommodate the new vacuoles results in the ”plumping” which smoothes the wrinkles. However, the cells are then seen to die off and slough from the skin. I’ve seen blogs and chats where the posters were quite alarmed by this, wondering if the use of this dangerous product should be stopped at once!  

Well, my beautiful readers, let’s step back a moment and not let this alarmism infect us! Because that is what any product which “promotes cell turnover” promotes: that surface cells slough off and, yes, die. Now, until they completely gut the Constitution, we’re perfectly free to believe they are reincarnated to better lives; go to Heaven; enjoy Paradise; or, for those damn zits, rot in Hell itself…but it’s highly unlikely they continue their same little epidermal lives on your scrubbie-cloth or after being washed down the drain. It’s only natural; it’s exfoliation. And, as I learned tonight in the same strangely ideological nature show I parody in my other blog tonight, even those wise and innocent creatures of the sea, Beluga whales, exfoliate: yup, those cute, creamy-skinned, blobular whales of popular lullabye fame go to Cetacean Spa Days, returning cyclically to certain special shallow streams with the gravel they find most effective and exquisite. There, they luxuriate in the exfoliation process, rolling and scrubbing around and against their preferred gravel beds until the dead skin and unsightly plankton-pigmented areas are gone. Fresh and rejuvenated, they return to deeper waters. Some tingling sensations, as it says on the bottle of any respectable exfoliating cleanser, are normal and temporary. I bet it’s much more fun to go to the spa with one’s whole pod.