Nobiletin reduces sebum production

If you have read part one of our posts on oil control and acne, you know that  Nobiletin has been shown to be very effective in reducing the amount of oil that is produced by the sebaceous glands, as well as the overall size of the glands themselves. If you have not yet read this post, click here to have a look. The researchers showed quite convincingly that Nobiletin reduced the production of sebum by hamster sebocytes, both in vitro and in vivo.

Nobiletin is found in Tangerine Extract

Nobiletin is a flavenoid that is present in many citrus fruits, and is especially prevalent in tangerine. The Tangerine Extract we use also has a large amount of tangeretin, which has a very similar structure as compared to nobiletin. For you chemistry buffs out there, there is only a  difference of one methoxyl group between the two.

Formulation and Testing

Over the last two months we have been working hard on putting together the optimal formulation for our new Tangerine Anti-Shine Cream. We obviously did not want to use an oil cream base for this product. After all, we are trying to reduce the amount of oil on your face, so adding more via the base would be kind of counter-productive. It took some doing, but we found an oil-free base that fits the ticket and that in and of it self is a very nice and luxurious moisterizer.

After finding the right formulation the testing team took its time to thoroughly test the new product. The response was very encouraging. One of our testers chose to first use it only on her nose, but within a week decided that the results were so good that she started to use it on her forehead also.  Here is what she said:

“I’ve been testing the Tangerine Anti-Shine Cream for about a week, and I’m already noticing a big difference! I started off just using it on my nose and expanded to using it on my forehead a few days later, and tonight I noticed that my nose was way less greasy than my forehead- which will be soon to follow the pattern! It smells really good, too ”

Kara from Irvine, CA

No strong tangerine smell

One question we received was: “Won’t I be smelling like an orange when I put this stuff on?” (this question came from a male on our test panel) The answer is a clear “No!”. The smell is quite subtle and goes away quickly. You won’t be able to smell it anymore within 15 minutes or so. Our test panel thought it smelled quite nice!

Very fast skin absorption

As is the case for our Acne Treatment product, the new Anti-Shine cream also is absorbed very quickly and spreads very easily. You only need a small dab for pretty much your whole face.

Only for night use

Sana Fela Tangerine Anti-Shine should only be used as a night cream. The reason why is because Tangerine Oil – as do other citrus oils – can make your skin more sensitive to the sun.   Until we have more data, we decided that it is best to only approve use as a night cream. In any case, once-nightly use has provided excellent oil control, so there is no need to have more than one treatment per 24 hour period.

Reducing oil can help prevent acne

There are many factors that are involved in causing acne, and which ones are responsible in each particular case is not always clear. However, since the amount of oil that is being produced by your skin is often correlated to the development of acne, it stands to reason that reducing the amount of oil produced will also help prevent acne.

The combination of Sana Fela Acne Treatment and Tangerine Anti-Shine in our test panel definitely helped to further control acne outbreaks.

One thing we want to test is whether it is possible to combine both products into one. We are actively working on this. One problem is that the Sana Fela Acne Treatment is typically used at least twice a day, whereas the Tangerine Anti-Shine is only a night cream. The obvious alternative is to make it available as a set.

Announcing the immediate availability of
Tangerine Anti-Shine Cream

Sana Fela is proud to announce the immediate availability of Tangerine Anti-Shine Cream, our new oil control facial cream that is designed to reduce oily skin by reducing the amount of sebum that is produced by the sebaceous glands.

Get your own!

Whether you would just like to reduce the oily sheen of your face, or whether you want to help prevent the (re-) occurence  of your acne, we are confident that you will like this new product.  Sana Fela Tangerine Anti-Shine Cream did wonders for the skin of our test panel. What worked for them will also work for you! So, get your own and see for yourself. As always we offer a 100% money-back guarantee. So what do you have to lose? Visit our store and order your own! Experience for yourself how much it will improve the looks of  your skin!

Here is to a healthier skin!

For further reading

How to reduce oily skin and prevent acne (1)
How to reduce oily skin and prevent acne (2)

Woody had tons of acne

Turns out that in his early twenties Woody had a terrible complexion and tons of acne.
Woody explains that his acne disappeared after he became a vegan. He has remained a vegan for the last 25 years and his acne never came back.

Says Woody: “It’s been at least 20 years. I used to eat burgers and steak, and I would just be knocked out afterward. I had to give it up. The first thing was dairy. I was about 24 years old and I had tons of acne and mucus. I met some random girl on a bus who told me to quit dairy and all those symptoms would go away three days later. By God she was right.”

If you are a regular here at Sana Fela, you know that we have discussed the role of diet in the development of acne before.

Looks like Woody is a good example of somebody that took that advise to heart and reaped the benefits.

Becoming a vegan helped Woody to stay acne free

Drinking milk can raise the levels of several hormones that play a key role in the development of acne. See this post for more details.
Likewise, consumption of lots of sugar can cause an increase in the production of oil by the sebaceous glands, which in turn leads to an increase in acne. The mechanism behind this is explained in this post. It is thus no wonder that a low carb diet can help prevent acne. By becoming a vegan, Woody stacked the cards to his advantage.

It is one thing to clear up an active acne out break. It is another to keep the acne from coming back.
Several solutions are available that can bring an acne outbreak under control. As you know, here at Sana Fela we are partial to using a natural Tea Tree Oil treatment, because it is simple and effective without being harsh on your skin like some of the other treatments.

How to keep acne at bay

Once you have a handle on your existing acne, how about taking steps to prevent it from returning? Have a critical look at your diet and see if there is something you can change to keep the acne away. Sounds simple? It can be if you consider changing your diet as something that is simple to do and worth it. But many of us would rather have there wisdom teeth pulled without anesthesia than to radically change our diet. Then again, maybe at least reducing things like milk, dairy and sugar in our daily diet would be worth it if it would help our skin.

Think about it. But don’t take our word for it. Ask Woody!

For further reading:

Role of diet in the development of acne

How to treat acne and prevent it from re-occuring

But the question is: how and why exactly do the hair follicles get plugged?

The answer is found in one of the properties of the bacteria (Ref 1, 2).

Acne bacteria secrete a glue-like substance

How bacterial biofilm causes acne

It turns out that the bacteria secrete a bio-film (glycocalix) of sticky polymers. The bacteria produce this bio-film to attach themselves to the walls of the hair follicles.  Some of this “glue” also ends up in the sebum (oil). This causes dead cells that are being sloughed off from the walls of the hair follicles, as well as bacteria and dirt to clump together.

Plugging of pores

The clumpiness gets worse and worse until the hair follicle is completely plugged. Now the mix of sebum, bacteria, dirt and dead cells (keratinocytes) cannot go anywhere. The hair follicle starts to swell and the infection gets really started. The end result is an acne break-out. First a whitehead is formed. More advanced stages are blackheads and actual acne lesions.

The sticky polymers also protect against antimicrobial agents

Incidentally, the sticky polymers not only causes everything to clump together and plug the hair follicles, but they also function as a protective shield that protects the bacteria from antimicrobial agents such as the ones that are being used to treat acne (Ref 2). This makes such agents less effective and is one of the reasons why acne is so hard to treat.

Use essential oils to unplug pores

Oil and water don’t mix. On the other hand, oils and oils do. The active ingredients in Sana Fela Acne Treatment are essential oils of Tea Tree and Eucalyuptus that have strong antibacterial and transdermal properties.

But there is more to it than that.  Since they are essential oils, it makes sense that these extracts also can dilute and help prevent the clumping together of sebum, bacteria, dead cells and dirt! This is one of the reasons why Sana Fela Acne Treatment works so well.

See  the pages on Sana Fela Acne Treatment and on Tea Tree Oil to learn more or visit the store to purchase your own!

References

1. Burkhart CG and Burkhart CN (2007) Expanding the microcomedone theory and acne therpeutics: Propionibacterium acnes biofilm producesbiological glue that holds corneocytes together to form plug.  J. Am. Acad. Dermatol 57:722-724

2.  Coenye T et al (2007) Biofilm formation by Propionibacterium acnes is associated with increased resistance to antimicrobial agents and increased production of putative virulence factors. Research in microbiology 158: 386-392

An awesome new paper on current understanding of the causes of acne and how it can be treated was recently published in Experimental Dermatology (1). This is like a consensus paper that was written by 14 scientists from all over the world — USA, Japan, China, Germany, Taiwan, Hungary, Italy, South Korea, Lithuanina, and Switzerland. The paper is not yet in print and only available as an e-publication. It was published online on June 23 and you can find it here. Unfortunately, as for most scientific papers, you can only see the abstract for free. You will have to pay to get access to the whole paper as a PDF file.
Or you can just read all about it here at sanafela.com

What’s in the paper?

The paper addresses pretty much the gammut of the current thinking about acne.
Some of the topics below may sound quite foreign to you, and I will do my best to explain it all in future posts. For now I just wanted to let you all know that this paper is out there, and then I’ll explain more as we go along.

• Biology of sebaceous glands
• Role of neuropeptides
• Role of innate immunity
• Stem cells for sebaceous glands
• Properties of sebocytes
• Role of hormones
• Hyperkeratinization
• Bacteria and sebum
• Role of nutrition
• Role of cytokines
• Role of Toll-like receptors
• New acne drugs
• Plant extracts with anti-acne properties

References

(1) Kurokawa et al (2009) New developments in our understanding of acne pathogenesis and treatment. Exp Dermatol. 2009 Jun 23. [Epub ahead of print]

Overproduction of sebum increases acne

Overproduction of sebum increases the likelihood of infections and acne out-breaks. Over-active sebaceous glands also cause an excessively oily facial skin. This feels unpleasant and is shiny and feels greasy. The pores are large and the whole situation feels unpleasant and ofcourse can result in inreased occurence of acne.

Retinoic acid reduces oil production but has side effects

Since an overproduction of sebum (oil) increases your chances for infections and acne, it makes sense that if you could reduce the amount of oil that is produced by the sebaceous glands, this should result in a reduction of infections and acne. Dermatologists have been looking for ways to reduce sebum production, but there are only a few known medications that are known to be effective for this. The best known are the retinoic acids such as Retin-A. Unfortunately these medications can have nasty side-effects such as severe skin dryness , flaking and blistering, as has been shown to cause birth defects and certain cancers in mice and rats. For more on Retin-A check out The Skinny on Retin-A. Obviously such medications are only available on prescription.

Mother nature to the rescue

While it is desireable to reduce sebum production to improve and prevent acne and oily skin, retinoic acid based medications have many side effects and are only available by presrciption. Fortunately, mother nature comes to the rescue. In the recent scientific literature there are a number of papers that discuss botanicals that have been shown to also reduce sebum production. One of these papers is discussed below. Be on the look-out for another post on this topic soon!

Nobiletin prevents acne and reduces oily skin

In an elegant paper by Takashi Sato and co-workers (1), we can read about the beneficial effects of Nobiletin on sebum reduction. Nobiletin is a flavonoid that is present in the peel of many citrus fruits. It is especially prevalent in mandarines (Citrus nobilis). Medicinal flavonoids have been shown to have a variety of beneficial effects when taken internally or used topically. These include antioxidant, free radical scavenging and anti-inflammatory activities, as well as antitumorigenic and antitumor metastatic activities (1).

The researchers applied a mixture of 2% nobiletin in 95% ethanol and 5% glycerol to the ears of hamsters once a day for 14 days and then measured the amount of triacylglycerol on the skin surface. Triacylglycerol is the main constituent of mammalian fat and is a major component of sebum. They also made microscope sections of the skin and analyzed the size of the sebaceous glands. The treatment decreased the amount of triacylglycerol on the skin surface by 34% and also reduced the size of the sebaceous glands. The researchers were even able to show that nobiletin reduced the rate of cell divisions by sebocytes, the cells in the sebaceous glands that secrete sebum.

Adapted from Sato et al. J Invest Dermatol 127 (2007) 2740

In another study, the researchers treated cultured hamster sebocytes with nobiletin. When these cells are treated with insulin, they respond by producing high levels of oil (triacylglycerol – compare the left two bars in the graph: “control” and “10 nM insulin”). By simultaneously treating the cells every 3 days with increasing concentrations of nobiletin, the researchers were able to force the cells to reduce the secretion of triacylglycerol almost back down to the low levels secreted in the absence of insulin (these are the three right bars in the graph).

In summary, this paper shows that nobiletin can effectively reduce the amount of oil produced by the sebaceous glands. Since less oil production means less predisposition to acne out-breaks, nobiletin should be a valuable addition to your acne treatment war chest!

Inspired by the scientific data above, Sana Fela is currently working on a new formulation of a Sebum Control cream based on Extracts of Tangerine. We will introduce this product soon. We are actively working on a complete line of botanical skin care products. If you would like to be notified about updates on our products or web site, please leave your contact information on our contact form

*** UPDATE***  November 2009 – Product development for Tangerine Anti-Shine Cream is now complete!  For details, see How to reduce oily skin and prevent acne part (3). Or visit our store to get your own!

References

(1) Takashi Sato, Aiko Takahashi, Mika Kojima, Noriko Akimoto, Masamichi Yano and Akira Ito (2007). A Citrus Polymethoxy Flavonoid, Nobiletin Inhibits Sebum Production and Sebocyte Proliferation, and Augments Sebum Excretion in Hamsters. Journal of Investigative Dermatology 127: 2740-2748

For further reading

How to reduce oily skin and prevent acne. Part (2)
How to reduce oily skin and prevent acne. Part (3)