Technology to enhance the effect of skin care cosmetics-Development of preservative-free nanocapsules with excellent permeability

 We are pleased to inform you that FANCL has succeeded in developing preservative-free nanocapsules with excellent skin penetration in collaboration with Kyowa Pharma Chemical Co., Ltd., a Kirin group company.

FANCL has been researching nanocapsules that deliver beauty ingredients to the skin with the aim of enhancing the effectiveness of skin care products. Among them, there was a technical problem in improving the skin permeability of nanocapsules while preserving the preservative-free characteristic of FANCL products. Kyowa Pharma Chemical and FANCL have collaborated to find a technology to solve this problem and jointly filed a patent application.

Nanocapsules used in general skin care products are made by dispersing hydrogenated lecithin 1) in water and refining it to nano size (one billionth of 1 m). Furthermore, by adding a beauty ingredient, you can make nanocapsules that retain the beauty ingredient inside. Since nanocapsules are fine, they have excellent penetration into the skin and play a role in delivering the beauty ingredients retained inside to the skin. In other words, the penetration of nanocapsules into the skin is thought to be directly linked to the functionality of skin care products.

Therefore, FANCL first added two types of visible nanocapsules to the three-dimensional skin model as an evaluation of the skin permeability of the nanocapsules, and after 30 minutes, the cross section of the skin model was compared and observed with a microscope.

Generally, the raw material of nanocapsules contains preservatives to prevent bacterial contamination. However, the use of such raw materials may cause irritation to the skin due to preservatives.

When enhancing antibacterial properties without adding preservatives, moisturizers with antibacterial activity are added, but these moisturizers interact with nanocapsules and cause the stability to be impaired. In particular, soft nanocapsules are prone to destabilization, and there were technical hurdles to making them preservative-free. Therefore, based on the hypothesis that a specific beauty ingredient stabilizes nanocapsules, we tried to stabilize soft nanocapsules.

Nanocapsules containing ectoine 2) and collagen tripeptide F3), which are beauty ingredients selected by FANCL, were produced by Kyowa Pharma Chemical after technical studies, and they were used as an index for stabilization of nanocapsules. I observed the size change

So far, FANCL has produced nanocapsules using hydrogenated lecithin and evaluated their various properties. Among them, it has been clarified that the properties of hydrogenated lecithin affect the membrane structure of nanocapsules and affect the flexibility of nanocapsules themselves.

As shown in Fig. 3 on the next page, the membrane structure of nanocapsules can be controlled by using hydrogenated lecithin with different characteristics. Specifically, the more regular the membrane structure, the harder the nanocapsules, and conversely, the more irregular the membrane structure, the higher the flexibility of the nanocapsules. Compared to hard nanocapsules, highly flexible nanocapsules have advantages such as excellent penetration into the skin, but it was difficult to stabilize soft nanocapsules without using preservatives.

Therefore, this time, Kyowa Pharma Chemical, which has its own nanocapsule raw material development technology and has many achievements in marketing, and FANCL, which has abundant knowledge of utilizing beauty ingredients, have jointly developed a preservative-free and soft nanocapsule.

This verification revealed that ectoine and collagen tripeptide F stabilize nanocapsules, but the detailed mechanism of stabilization is still unclear. In the future, we believe that further functionalization of nanocapsules can be promoted by clarifying how the properties of these beauty ingredients contribute to the stabilization of nanocapsules.