Dr. Joe Chang on Collagen+

I don't want you to walk away out of this room and say, 'Oh, this is just another me-too copycat product.' There are lots of collagen products out there, right? I mean, it's really available. What I'm hoping that you will take away is the message that this product once again went through a process answering this question: 'What if we need to develop a beauty supplement that is truly beneficial?' We did not start with the question, or at least the scientists never did, 'What if we develop a collagen product that can compete with our competitors?' It's a different question, and the approach will be different. So the formal question that I just posed to you about developing a beauty supplement is far more profound. It's far more something that you can actually say it will do some good, and not just piggyback on some anecdotal studies or anecdotal findings that collagen is good for you. So that's really what we started, and the answer that we've got is that in order to do that, yes, we have to include collagen, but it requires other ingredients that are equally important to bring a comprehensive benefit to the skin. So that's what we did, and that's why I think it's important. This is the most complete, clinically proven beauty supplement. It's not a sort of a collagen product; it is a beauty supplement that has been clinically proven. And the second thing, and the thing is because the two other ingredients that we have in there, like lutein and the ceramides, they are very, very important. If I distill all of that down into what you need to understand about the Beauty Focus, it would be: the lutein helps to protect all the new collagen that you are going to make from the collagen peptide that we have included in this product, and the ceramide is a wonderful substance to have in the product because it helps you to hold on to the water. Because what do you hear from dermatologists time and time again? 'Moisturize, moisturize, moisturize.' Right? The skin needs moisture, and one of the most effective ways of holding on to the water that you have in your skin is to have the ceramides in that, because molecularly and chemically it acts like a sponge; it holds on to the water molecules, and therefore your skin stays hydrated. So now hopefully you can begin to see why this combination, the blending of the three ingredients together, gives us this unique formula, and it's proprietary to Nu Skin. We don't copy; we make something that is truly meaningful. And I've been hearing a lot of feedback from some of the previews that we have of these products, and after three or four weeks we are already starting to see significant benefits on the skin visually. So really, on the first one, we have the biophotonic scanner; it's easy for us to assess. So some of the more knowledgeable folks in the audience today would say, 'Wait a minute, right, there are other antioxidants around; why don't you use the others?' Well, lutein, it just so happened based on our studies, is the fact that this antioxidant seems to migrate and has an affinity for the skin. So it gets there when you take it; it really rapidly gets to the skin and it stays there. And we can show that by scanning people that have taken this Beauty Focus product, you can see the antioxidant protection goes up. And to remind you, right, when you have antioxidant in the skin, obviously when you walk out on a hot summer's day here, as soon as you leave this building, you're going to be exposed to one of the environmental factors, and that will be the sun. What good is it if you sort of have all the great new collagens being made, but you then continuously get yourself exposed to the sun? They get destroyed. So this lutein, this antioxidant protector, is there to shield those new collagens from getting destroyed and preserving that. So that's really a very good benefit which is not recognized by many of our folks. And the ceramides, and this is just a cross section of the skin, it's just a cartoon to illustrate the fact that water molecules, when they're inside the skin, plump it up; it stays hydrated, so everything else in the skin works better. And that's what the ceramides do. Right? These are the phytoceramides that have been isolated from marigold. It's a wonderful ingredient to have, and those are the three important elements that we have in Beauty Focus. Okay, you're still not convinced; you're still going to ask me, 'What's so good about your collagen peptide?' So we also know, in and of itself, the parent molecule of collagen does no good, because when you take that, when you ingest that, it gets broken down by your stomach, the acid, the enzymes that are there; they get broken down. It really doesn't provide the benefits that have been suggested for the collagen. That was about the initial original finding when we did our research. So what we did was to use some molecular scissors, that is a core enzyme, and we can literally chop it up into bits and pieces, so the little fragments of collagen. And out of these hundreds of fragments, now it comes in different sizes; we evaluated that to see which collagen peptide or fragment stays in the skin and does some good, in other words actually has some biological activity. And the one that we chose is what we have in Beauty Focus. And this is what it is: this particular peptide that we have, from the studies we now know, it acts as a building block; it's like a Lego. You can build something out of this particular fraction, a fragment, once it gets to the skin. And by the way, when you take it through the stomach, it actually doesn't get destroyed; it goes rapidly into the blood and finally lands in the skin. So when it gets there, it gets to the building block, and it also stimulates the skin cells to make even more collagen. It's a dual-action peptide, we call it. So that's why that's the rationale, if you will, and the rationale is based and confirmed with the scientific findings that we have. And it's all great, right? We are scientists; we are enamored with seeing all these wonderful molecular mechanisms that happen, but does it mean anything? Does it translate to what I would call a clinical benefit? And this is what you have: your skin can become more elastic, in other words it bounces back; your wrinkle volume goes down; and there's, as I already mentioned, there's actually even more collagen being produced in the skin. Right? So it really does have the eventual beneficial outcome that is clinically meaningful. And when you get a Professor Zoe Draelos at Duke University, a renowned dermatologist, evaluating this particular Beauty Focus, she came back with this study and said, 'Yes, the overall appearance dramatically improved, the texture improves, the skin is smoother, and overall you look more radiant.' I think we have done a pretty good job on the Beauty Focus to deliver those results. All right. And anyway, the guys in the audience, hey, you've got to drink it too, all right, because there are other additional non-skin benefits which I won't talk about today until I talk to my... [Laughter] So lawyer it anyway. Coming back to the beauty device category, after all, if you have something good, why don't we test and see whether the combination works? And once again, I think you don't need to be a scientist to look at it that all these features that we evaluated, we can see a very marked improvement when you take the beauty supplement and then use the LumiSpa. And off the record a little bit, since you are, we're all family here, right? It's a sort of silence; it's likely that these results will translate with the use of Boost as well, so when you get it later on. Yeah, anyway. Competition? All right, all right, don't ask me this question. Here it is: it's really simply put, proprietary population is beautiful, good, and most competitive products just contain collagen, and they don't even know what that collagen is, and it's totally unproven. Other companies don't do these kind of studies because it's possible. I mean, by the time we finish all the clinical studies with Beauty Focus, it'd probably be over half a million dollars. Okay. And blue light, you can, I already referred to UV, but you can also protect with lutein against blue light, and it synergizes with LumiSpa. And it's pure, and this is something that's perhaps not as exciting because you take it as a given, but when you're dealing with natural ingredients and so on, there's always a chance that it could be contaminated. We test for it; that's the reason why some of the labs that we've seen over in the innovation center, that's the reason we test our products in that sense. Okay, quickly, should I talk about these?