Sodium Hyaluronate

We use sodium hyaluronate, not hyaluronic acid (HA).

Not because sodium hyaluronate is a great hydrator, but because it participates - quietly - in the skin’s existing water management system when used in the Biology Serum. Sodium hyaluronate is a salt form of HA. It’s more stable, smaller, and less disruptive. It integrates into skin where HA doesn’t, because it’s a smaller molecule. It works with the skin-native ingredients we use in a way the HA format can’t.

We use sodium hyaluronate within our formulation because it helps form and contributes to the light, breathable structure of the Biology Serum in the epidermis. This bio-architecture contributes to a natural slowing of water loss from the skin as it also supports and enhances the natural moisturising factors (NMFs), osmolytes, and skin barrier signals critical to your natural, evolved ability of, skin hydration.

The industry uses the word hyaluronic acid to sell the theatre of hydration: a sensation of hydration coolness as product water evaporates from the skin surface. They use sodium hyaluronate ~95% of the time as it's cheaper to make product with it, but they still call it hyaluronic acid as that the ingredient they invested in for so long before quietly dropping it. It’s sold by them as a hydrator, employing the marketing science of nonsense.

Adding an occlusive to HA or sodium hyaluronate to “lock-in” water is bad for skin as it creates hyper-hydration. This disrupts the skin barrier. So it loses more water (TEWL). This artificial barrier that “locks-in” hydration” signals to the skin that it’s in a near-100% humid environment, so the skin stops making the natural moisturising factors that evolved to draw water from the air. Now your skin feels dry without using a product, and that’s the ”skincare” dependency loop. Ironically you’ve hydrated or moisturised your skin into dryness, and it takes a complete skin cycle of 4 to 8 weeks (it’s subject to age) to fully recover your own hydration ability.

This dependency loop is another reason we developed the Biology Serum, so that people could use our product to break this cycle, and not be dependant on their products.

All of the HA marketing hype is built on a science myth: The claim that HA holds “1,000× its weight in water” originated from a 1961 paper that was misread. It was exaggerated to 6,000× in 1998 - with no data. It was repeated in 2009 - with no correction. And it’s still repeated by the “experts”.

In 2023, Borchers et al. tested it. (see Bibliography below). They showed that: 1g of HA can bind just 0.36g of water. Not 1,000g of water. Not even 1g of water.

This matters because a compromised face - stripped by moisturisers, occlusion, preservatives, and over-cleansing - loses up to 10 mL of water a day. Your skin barrier is down. You’d need nearly 40 wine bottles of a so-called “1% HA” product to deliver those 10 mL of water to the skin - assuming 100% stayed in - which it won’t. Most evaporates. Those “5%” or “10%” HA ingredient claims? They usually refer to the concentration of an HA solution, not pure HA powder. That solution is mostly water. So the maths never works for HA.

Worse: HA in these products is already fully saturated with product water. So it can’t attract more water - only lose it. It sits on the skin, dries out, then flakes off. So “high HA” doesn’t mean high hydration. It means more evaporation, more tightness, and a need to re-apply.

The Biology Serum is designed to break the skincare products cycle. Osmolytes like the glycerol and trehalose we use to restore gradient control in the skin. Gradient control is the skin’s ability to balance water movement: not too much going out - not too much staying trapped. A healthy balance of hydration. Not the hyper-hydration hype of “quenching” or flooding” - it’s about balance.

Sodium hyaluronate is one part of the Biology Serum’s structure. It holds 0.36% of its weight in pure distilled water. Not to hydrate. Just to help stabilise the skin-native structure of the Biology Serum. Only distilled water does this - and no one else uses it. Distilled water delivered by sodium hyaluronate protects both the integrity and complexity of our ingredients - and the skin’s own complex moisturising factors. It brings a calmness to what we’re doing.

If you stop using skincare, your skin barrier gets to work again. It re-learns natural hydration with the help of The Biology Serum and enhances it. It's intelligent, biology-focused hydration, not skincare hype.

Skin water loss drops, as does the dependency on skincare for a 'top-up', meaning over time you need fewer products, saving your skin, your time and your money. It's time to stop the dryness that skincare system creates and maintains.

[Bibliography]

Borchers, L., & Pirrung, S. (2023). The fallacy of hyaluronic acid binding a thousand times its weight in water. ChemRxiv.

Ogston, A. G., & Phelps, C. F. (1961). The partition of solutes between buffer solutions and solutions containing hyaluronic acid. Biochemical Journal, 78(3), 827–833.

Sutherland, I. W. (1998). Novel and established applications of microbial polysaccharides. Trends in Biotechnology, 16(1), 41–46.

Becker, L. C., Bergfeld, W. F., Belsito, D. V., Klaassen, C. D., Marks, J. G., Shank, R. C., ... & Andersen, F. A. (2009). Final report of the safety assessment of hyaluronic acid, potassium hyaluronate, and sodium hyaluronate. International Journal of Toxicology, 28(4_suppl), 5–67.