Fullerenes can benefit on beauty may just be a scam!

Let’s start with a paragraph of wikipedia to understand.

Fullerene or Buckyball, Buckyball (English: Buckyball) is a hollow molecule composed entirely of carbon in the shape of a sphere, ellipsoid, column or tube. Fullerenes are structurally similar to graphite, which consists of layers of graphene stacked in six-membered rings, while fullerenes contain not only six-membered rings but also five-membered rings and occasionally seven-membered rings.
The first fullerene, the “C60 molecule” or ” fullerene,” was prepared at Rice University in 1985 by British chemist Dr. Harold Waterall-Croteau and American scientist Richard Smalley because the molecule was similar to the architect The molecule was named “Buckminster-Fullerene” (Buckyball) in tribute to the architectural work of Buckminster Fuller, whose work it resembled. Sumio Iijima had observed such onion-like structures under a transmission electron microscope before 1980. Fullerene molecules also exist in nature, and in 2010 scientists discovered through the Spitzer Space Telescope that fullerenes also exist in outer space. “Perhaps fullerenes in outer space provide the seeds of life on Earth.”
Before the discovery of fullerenes, the only isomers of carbon were graphite, diamond, and amorphous carbon (such as carbon black and charcoal), and its discovery has greatly expanded the number of isomers of carbon. The unique chemical and physical properties of fullerenes and carbon nanotubes, as well as their potential applications in technology, have attracted strong interest from scientists, especially in materials science, electronics, and nanotechnology.

quoted from wikipedia “fullerene”

Last year I posted two short videos about how the skin care benefits of fullerenes might are just a scam! It actually made a little ripple on Chinese social media(I thought, haha). Honestly, when I traveled to Taiwan a few years ago, I remember when I was in a cosmetic store in the 101 building and the clerk said to me nicely, “Sir! We have this fullerene liquid! Japanese Mitsubishi Oh, it can resist UV rays on your skin, super anti-aging, but also can reduce wrinkles, let you ****. ” (here I omitted a lot of words, please make this up in your mind with the Taiwan accent)

That was the first time I heard of fullerenes, and then after I bought fullerene serum online! A semi-viscous liquid full of small bubbles, applied on my face out of a very light layer, nothing special feeling. Later, after becoming interested in cosmetic ingredients, combined with my own profession, I consulted some information and experiments and found that.

I was fooled! Fullerene beauty is really a scam!

Apparently, Japan Mitsubishi from the nineties began to work on fullerene mass production, but then Mitsubishi faced fullerene sell gloomy (the price for fullerene is cheaper each year). The demand for fullerenes from scientific research institutions is also decreasing (refer to fullerenes related research literature decreasing year by year). Mitsubishi started to work on it, by calling it a “beauty solution” and licensing the fullerene “soccer” trademark for the brands that bought the material from them (Geez, Mitsubishi, is that all you got?!). What’s incredible is that Mitsubishi still doesn’t have enough evidence to prove what fullerenes can do any good for skin care! Fewer and fewer brands are awkwardly selling fullerenes in Japan, and now in 2020s, the fullerene hype was picked up in China! But it seems that some fullerene brands in the Chinese market are coming from miscellaneous, niche brands that are not well known.

My views are basically expressed in the following short videos.

1. Fullerenes are currently considered to have limited antioxidant capacity, and in vivo experiments have shown that the antioxidant capacity (rate of free radical scavenging) may be one percent of that of human SOD.
2. Current research indicates that the antioxidant capacity of fullerenes is inversely proportional to their concentration (i.e., the higher the concentration, the weaker the antioxidant capacity, but there is no research on what concentration is optimal).
3. There is almost no data on the transdermal absorption of fullerenes, and some research teams have used digital models to simulate that the transdermal absorption is almost 0 (why not do simple human measurements?).
4. The current antioxidant experiments with fullerenes seem to be the Japanese electron co-spin from the 1990s, and there are almost no common in vitro experiments to measure the antioxidant capacity (another blogger friend of mine who loves to do experiments told me that he could not do the anti OH radical capacity with fullerenes).
5. The published fullerene beauty and skin care experiments seem to be very few test subjects, very short testing time, and all very subjective judgments.

In order to learn more about fullerenes, I also tried to contact Dr Chistyakov in Russia, a professor who has published dozens of studies on the antioxidant properties of fullerenes. Dr Chistyakov responded to me with several of his more recent fullerene-related studies on the antioxidant principles of fullerenes, and Dr Chistyakov’s team speculated that
Fullerenes have a spherical structure that can adsorb no more than 6 protons (H+), allowing themselves to be charged while neutralizing free radicals.
So I guess this is the reason why there is no way to measure that fullerenes can neutralize OH radicals? (Current experiments seem to be that fullerenes can neutralize superoxide radicals?)

At the same time, Dr Chistyakov’s study concluded that fullerenes are not yet well studied in toxicology, and that the relevant animal models and human studies are not sufficient, though the future is promising! (I really think so too)

I would like to say that fullerene structure is strange and will certainly have great use in the future, but if you use fullerenes to fool people now, forget it!