New Rub for the Skin Game

By Anastasia Toufexis

At Marshall Field's in Chicago, hundreds of disappointed customers placed orders at $195 each for out-of-stock introductory kits of Glycel, a new line of skin-care products. In Las Vegas, caustic-tongued but delicate-skinned Comic Joan Rivers complained that the local Neiman-Marcus was out of Glycel supplies. In New York City, Maryanna Mangino was luckier; she managed to walk out of Saks Fifth Avenue with $300 worth of assorted Glycel lotions and potions. "I guess I'm hoping for something mysteriously new that just might work to get rid of wrinkles," said Mangino. "After all, who ever thought you could put a heart back into somebody else's body?"

Her question is not an idle one. Beaming down approvingly on the crowds at Glycel counters and from glossy magazine ads at would-be customers is the image of a handsome, clear-eyed man--not a hunky male model, mind you, but an even more potent lure: Dr. Christiaan Barnard. The South African surgeon who performed the first successful heart transplant is now, according to advertisements, the co-developer of a patented GSL ingredient, the key to "rejuvenating" skin in Glycel products. Barnard's endorsement is the latest and most successful wrinkle in the lucrative skin game. Introduced only last month, Glycel has already topped $5 million in sales. The famed surgeon's involvement has also proved controversial. Declares Dermatologist Albert Kligman of the University of Pennsylvania, who has consulted for a rival manufacturer: "It's one huge piece of hype, and the motive is an ancient one: money."

The stakes are admittedly high. "Skin care is becoming hotter and hotter in the U.S.," says John Ledes, editor of the industry newsletter Cosmetic World. Consumers handed over $1.2 billion last year for various pricy cleansers, scrubs, gels, emulsions, foams and masks that promise to give the skin a healthy, rosy glow. The healthy, rosy sales glow is expected to continue with perhaps as much as a 13% increase this year, thanks to a steadily aging population, the emphasis on a fit, natural look, and newly broadened product lines. As night cream follows day, one thing in the best-selling new prestige lines leads to another. "You don't just get a one-shot, one-bottle solution to facial problems," notes Ledes. "You develop a regime."

To push their treatments, manufacturers have buffed up an old gambit: the scientific slant. Names, and often prices, are suggestive of proprietary drugs: Estee Lauder's Prescriptives, L'Oreal's Biotherm and Revlon's European Collagen Complex. The list of ingredients in many concoctions would make the witches of Hampstead Heath envious, from plant extracts like soybean and avocado oil to miracle chemicals. In May, Shiseido will introduce a 24-hour cream, BH 24, containing biohyaluronic acid. La Prairie boasts that its Cellular Wrinkle Cream has proteins from the placentas of black sheep (because they are so resistant to disease, explains the manufacturer).

"The cosmetic companies are becoming more aggressive in medical marketing and are making more medical claims all the time," says Dermatologist James Fulton Jr. of the Acne Research Institute in Newport Beach, Calif. But they try to stay a hairsbreadth short of claiming too much. "If the intended use for a product is to alter normal bodily function--in this case, aging--then you'd be marketing a drug," says Bruce Brown, a spokesman for the Food and Drug Administration, and that would require tests and proof of efficacy that companies would rather avoid. As it is, some critics charge that the line between cosmetics and drugs is not policed rigorously enough by the FDA and the Federal Trade Commission, which oversees ads.

Many doctors contend that Glycel's claims for its active ingredient GSL also go beyond the bounds of allowable puffery. GSL, short for glycosphingolipid, is a natural component of skin, they point out, but when applied on the surface, its molecules are too large to penetrate into the regenerating lower layers of tissue. "It would be like giving someone a blood transfusion by rubbing blood into the skin," says Dermatologist Vincent DeLeo of Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City. All that Glycel products can do, say most experts, is act like any moisturizer, trapping water in the top layers of skin, which does smooth out lines and wrinkles, but only temporarily. "You simply can't turn back the clock," declares DeLeo. The best strategy, he says, is to wash with a mild soap and stay out of the sun.

Barnard, now a scientist in residence at Oklahoma City's Baptist Medical Center after severe arthritis ended his surgical career, defends Glycel's promotion of GSL and his qualifications. As part of a research team at the Shaefer Institute in Basel, Switzerland, over the past five years, he says, he studied GSL's effect on tissue cultures and its healing properties on burns, cuts and ulcers. GSL "will promote healing when the damage is due to environmental factors, and a lot of the aging and changes you see in the skin are due to environmental injuries," he declares. So "it must have some basis as a skin-care product."

Barnard wants the test findings to be published, but the manufacturer, Alfin Fragrances, demurs, citing trade secrecy. "The burden of proof will rest with the consumer," says Company President Irwin Alfin. "If they like the product, they'll continue to buy it. If they don't like it, we won't have a business." So far they like it a lot; reorders are rolling in. The cosmetic faithful seem to have adopted a new unction. "It's like church," observes a saleswoman behind a Bloomingdale's cosmetics counter. "If you don't believe in God in the first place, you don't go in."

With reporting by Scott Brown/Los Angeles and Eileen Garred/New York