You're involved, perhaps deeply, with Joe A. Lewis, even though the two of you have never met. Look in your medicine cabinet or handbag. If it contains a product with alpha-hydroxy acid, idebenone, or coffeeberry, you're likely relying on Lewis to put your best face forward. The whip-smart Southerner scouted these ingredients for some of skin care's most promising products—MD Formulations, Prevage, and more. That's why in the beauty industry, he's not just a chemist, he's the king of cosmeceuticals.
Lewis is a bit of an overachiever. He has 20 years' experience as a skin-care and pharmaceutical product formulator. While earning a degree in chemistry, he also majored in biology and physics, and minored in math. That he's somewhat of a trade secret, and not a brand name like many dermatologists, has less to do with modesty than with his behind-the-scenes mission: finding new anti-aging ingredients in scientific backwaters (read: academic laboratories, often unrelated to cosmetic chemistry) and bringing them into skin-care's big time. What's different about Lewis is that rather than use his findings to build his own product range, which he's just now begun to do with his spa brand Priori, he's made a business out of backing others'.
Proof in the Product
The business model of Lewis and his business partner, Joe DiNardo, a toxicologist and former vice president of research and development for Revlon, might be unusual, but it's impressively scrupulous. The two invest about two years and up to a half million dollars to prove ingredient safety and effectiveness, then license their wares to top pharmaceutical and beauty companies. Because of this level of rigor, the Joes are known for skin-care ingredients with medical credibility. "We start at the top of the food chain, launch our ingredients within the dermatology community, and use real science to demonstrate real results," says Lewis. "We can't just say, 'This ingredient is the best. It works.' Doctors expect double-blind, third-party, clinical trials. So that's what we do." When the deal's been brokered, Lewis steps out of the picture, and the brand promotes the new product as if it were its own innovation.
Lewis's forte is anti-aging technologies. Two of his three hit ingredients are antioxidants. (They protect the skin from premature aging.) But the notion of slowing down time and preserving the past runs through Lewis's life. He and his wife, Sofi, collect Egyptian antiquities, particularly mummy cases, coffin boards, and afterlife statuary like scarabs. (They've given or loaned several pieces to Atlanta's Michael C. Carlos Museum and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.) Their Richmond, Virginia, home also contains dozens of flat files filled with bugs and butterflies meticulously classified by genus. Even Lewis himself seems remarkably well preserved, his boyish looks and boundless energy belying his age (52) and serious résumé.
Alpha Male
Lewis came up with his first skin-care hit, alpha-hydroxy acids (AHAs), in the early '80s. He was working as "chemist, cook, and bottle washer" at a five-employee shop, Herald Pharmacal. It made unsexy drugstore products—Aquamed Lotion, Herald Tar Shampoo, and Mapo Bath Oil—that were recommended by dermatologists. But it was letters from grateful users of its AquaLacten Lotion that provided the eureka moment: "If it can smooth seriously dry skin, what can it do for the rest of us?" recalls Lewis.
In 1983, Lewis launched Aqua Glycolic Lotion, the first skin-care product with glycolic acid, a type of AHA. It was recommended for dry skin. "We didn't even know it was good for wrinkles then," says Lewis, about the now-ubiquitous ingredient. In 1988, he created MD Formulations (now owned by mineral makeup giant Bare Escentuals), a brand dedicated to AHAs. The ingredient and its marketing were way ahead of their time: The front of the box had a space where the doctor could put a sticker with his or her name—this was before the Murads and Perricones. And magazine ads compared the benefits of AHA on skin to a peeled onion. It was an incredibly successful campaign. "When I started in this industry, skin was thought to be dead," says DiNardo. "Into the '80s we began to realize that everything has an effect on it. That's where AHAs really took off." Says Lewis: "We were all discovering that AHAs were doing more than treating dry skin. It was doing something for radiance and for fine lines and wrinkles. And then, well, it was a mad race."
Lewis likes to say that AHAs really started the cosmeceutical revolution. "Before AHAs, cosmetics could cover up, fill in, and hide. That's it. The benefits washed down the drain," says Lewis. "For the first time that didn't happen. There was a lasting visible improvement in the skin. It gave people that glow that they loved."
"Superceutical"
But it was idebenone—"the orange-colored, mitochondria-targeting, free-radical-fighting molecule"—that put Lewis on the map. And it's the ingredient he's most passionate about. Lewis found it at the 2000 American Academy of Dermatology conference, through a team of German researchers. They were investigating it for use in organ transplant preservation solutions, and discovered it could protect membranes from oxygen exposure. "It turns out they had a super-powerful antioxidant," says Lewis, who worked out that it could also protect skin, the largest organ. "We did a huge amount of very cool research on idebenone," he adds, referring to studies published in a 2005 issue of the Journal of Cosmetic Dermatology. The tests showed that idebenone, which Lewis first licensed to pharmaceutical powerhouse Allergan for Prevage MD, was an even better antioxidant than vitamins C and E.
Lewis explains that idebenone targets the mitochondria, the source of cellular aging. (Mitochondria are the "fiery furnaces of the cell," which spew free radicals as byproducts of energy production.) The energy of living, "results in aging," says Lewis. (In a typical aside, he explains that the rate of one's metabolic energy production is directly proportional to lifespan. "It's why a hummingbird lives two years and a tortoise to 100. The hummingbird's huge energy output also produces huge amounts of toxic free radicals, so its lifespan is short.") Idebenone, by canceling out the damaging by-products, enables cells to repair themselves. Because it's an antioxidant that protects and corrects, Lewis calls idebenone a superceutical.
If you want to get Lewis's blood boiling, ask him about the role sunscreens play in preventing damage to the skin. Why, when we're using more sunscreen than ever, he asks, are skin cancer rates at their highest? "It's probably because sunscreens don't offer 100 percent protection—we know that's the case with UVA—and because they have no free-radical-fighting capacity." So when Lewis launched his own skin-care range with idebenone called Priori, he created the most protective product he could. Named Radical Defense, it simultaneously dispenses a broad-spectrum SPF 30 sunscreen and an idebenone moisturizer with an Environmental Protection Factor (EPF) of 95 (out of 100), which measures the potency of antioxidants. Lewis came up with the method for determining an antioxidant's EPF during the idebenone studies, and he's hoping other companies take it up. "Right now it's impossible for consumers to know which antioxidants are doing anything for their skin."
Java Joe
These days Lewis is full of facts about coffee and its health benefits. "Coffee is the number one source of antioxidants in the American diet," says Lewis, quoting a 2005 study by Joe Vinson, Ph.D., a chemistry professor at the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania. Not because its antioxidant value is higher than blueberries, say, but because Americans aren't having two cups of blueberries at breakfast and another one that afternoon. "And people think coffee's bad for them," he laughs.
Lewis isn't interested in the beverage, but the berry, in particular the fleshy part of the fruit, which has "wonderful polyphenolic compounds," such as chlorogenic acid, proanthocyanidins, and ferulic acid. In a six-week, double-blind study, he found that these coffee cherry antioxidants improved the appearance of fine lines, wrinkles, and skin tone substantially. The ORAC value (a measure of antioxidants in foods used by the United States Department of Agriculture) of Lewis's coffee-cherry extract is 15,000, a sky-high score compared to prunes (5,770) and kale (1,770), the runners-up. "Until now, there haven't been great anti-aging benefits in all-natural skin-care products," says Lewis. He's so impressed with these findings, and with the success of Revaléskin, which uses the ingredient in the dermatology arena, that he's launching a Priori coffeeberry range in spas. In typical Lewis fashion, he's already given coffeeberry a moniker: He's calling it a "natureceutical."
November 6, 2008
