What is Hyaluronic Acid?
Hyaluronic acid, also known as hyaluronan, is a clear, gooey substance that is naturally produced by your body.
The largest amounts of it are found in your skin, connective tissue and eyes.
Its main function is to retain water to keep your tissues well lubricated and moist.
Hyaluronic acid has a variety of uses. Many people take it as a supplement, but it’s also used in topical serums, eye drops and injections.
Roughly half of the hyaluronic acid in your body is present in your skin, where it binds to water to help retain moisture.
What are the benefits of hyaluronic acid applied to the skin?
Hyaluronic acid plays a key role in wound healing.
It’s naturally present in the skin, but its concentrations increase when there is damage in need of repair.
Hyaluronic acid helps wounds heal faster by regulating inflammation levels and signalling the body to build more blood vessels in the damaged area.
Applying it to skin wounds has been shown to reduce the size of wounds and decrease pain faster.
Hyaluronic acid also has antibacterial properties, so it can help reduce the risk of infection when applied directly to open wounds.
What’s more, it’s effective at combating gum disease, speeding up healing after tooth surgery and eliminating ulcers when used topically in the mouth.
More HA benefits
- anti-aging
- moisturizing
- wound healing
- anti-wrinkle
- increases skin elasticity
- can treat eczema
- can treat facial redness
What is the most effective Hyaluronic acid serum?
We recommend keeping the HA concentration below 2 percent. Why?
The benefits of hyaluronic acid on the skin has to do with its molecular weight and concentration. In this case, size matters! The molecular weight refers to its mass, or how big the HA molecule is. This is measured in something called unified atomic mass units — daltons, or kDa for short.
They found that treatment with 130 kDa HA was the most effective, increasing skin elasticity by 20 percent. Both the 50 and 130 kDa groups had significant improvement in wrinkle-depth and skin roughness after 60 days. All the other molecular weights still improved elasticity and skin hydration, just less so.
There are some varieties of HA that are a bit controversial, and increased percentage levels are actually linked to inflammatory skin diseases like psoriasis.
Bottom Line!
A very low molecular weight of 50 and 130 kDA HA and 1.5% concentration has the ability to penetrate the skin most effectively.
