What are rice benefits for skin? And do they actually work?

Asian cultures have harnessed the power of rice for centuries for its brightening and anti-agingpower.

Watch Marissa explain to you all the benefits rice can bestow onto your face:

Why did I decide to love on rice so much that I used three types of ricein the Carol's Sake & Rice Serum? Because as you remember from Marissa's video ABOVE ^, you know that rice is a ridiculously effective natural ingredient for hyperpigmentation, and I know how much Carol brightening her skin tone and evening her complexion.

Also, because age spots often plague Asian women as our first signs of aging, I knew a topical product that would help any discoloration would be #1 on her list!

And, most of all, I needed to make a serum that would work optimally with her skin microbiome -- a developing new field of dermatology and cosmetic research.

Ok, so cool about the serum.Why am I making you suddenly read about the skin microbiome? 

Because the answer as to whether topical skincare ingredients are actually effective at all --has everything to do with your skin microbiome!

One question skincare bloggers and Redditors are obsessed with is the question: can skincare products actually penetrate deeply enough into your skin to work?

Skin care bloggers and many forums claim that many ingredients cannot actually penetrate the skin deeply enough for the good stuff to be used. For example, I've heard claims thatcollagen (which is formed in your dermis, and is critical to all types of skin renewal (plumping, firming, diminishing fine lines, helping redness) is too large a molecule to actually work when you apply it topically. Because it istoo big to actually be absorbed.

So, just like you would ask about collagen, you should ask:would the rice extract in each of my ingredients be able to be processed by your skin at an effective enough topical level?

In other words,how do you know if the rice extract in skincare products actually penetrate deeply enough to brighten your skin and even your skin tone?

The answer lies in understanding your skin microbiome.

Image taken from Baldwin, Hilary, et al. "The Role of a Cutaneous Microbiota Harmony in Maintaining a Functioning Skin Barrier." Journal of Drugs in Dermatology,16(1): 2017, Figure 1.

Now that you know answering the question as to whether topical products are effective lies in your skin microbiome, WTF is your skin microbiome anyway?

In summary:allll the invisible, teeny bugs that can't be seen by the human eye that live on the surface of your skin (allll the way down to the deepest layers of your skin.) These bugs are known as your microbiota, and they live in symbiosis with your skin. Living in symbosis means that they work in tandem with your skin--these microbiota get food from your skin, and the byproducts of the microbes' digestion makes yummy things like proteins that your skin needs to function well.

A single square centimeter of the human skin can contain up to one billion microorganisms (including bacteria, fungi, mites and viruses). While bacteria only makes up 0.1% of this billion (1 million organisms per square centimeter), they are considered the most important organisms because of the symbiotic role they play with human cells. You can find bacteria not only on your skin surface, but all the way down the skin layers (in the deeper layers of the epidermis, the dermis and the dermal adipose tissue <--that's all the way DOWN until it ain't skin any longer).

As I explained in last month's blog post, microbiologists are only now starting to understand how these skin microbiota (the bacteria on your skin, as well as in different parts of your body, like your gut and vagina) may play a critical role in helping us to understand how disease occurs and develops in the human body.

Your skin has both good and bad bacteria living on it. And together with your skin cells, this forms your "skin microbiome" - an environment where microbiota live in communication with your skin. A healthy microbiome is one which contains a great diversity of bacteria, and is rich in commensal bacteria.

An unhealthy microbiome is in dysbiosis,and as you can see from figure 1, dysbiosis leads to an impaired skin barrier, which can result in redness/inflammation, acne, rosacea, overly dry or oily skin, and more.

As microbiologist dermatologists like Whitney Bowe [2] have said, to maintain a healthy skin microbiome, you need to throw out those hand sanitizers and anything labeled antibacterial. Because "antibacterial" gels, lotions, sprays etc. get rid of all the bacteria on your skin -- good and bad. (Natural antimicrobials like honey or tea tree oil are fine, use those in place of a gel thats marketed as "antimicrobial."

Why avoid artificial antimicrobials? Because scraping your skin of all your good bacteria can mean leaving it more open to threat--and making it easier for bad bacteria to come and take over.

It also means, however, trying to add good bacteria to your skin, and the food for good bacteria.

And this is How I Designed The Carol's Sake & Rice Serum:designing the serum that will most quickly restore the health of your skin microbiome when topically applied. Effectively, by designing probiotic skincare.

Note: while Carol's Sake & Rice Serum is the very first product of ours to be marketed as probiotic skincare, even though the majority of Sabbatical Beauty products are actually probiotic -- because we use somany fermented natural extracts in our products, and in high percentages too!

What defines the field of probiotic skincare?

Probiotic Skincare can contain 3 types of probiotics:

1. Probiotics, or live bacteria. Those pills you eat? The bacteria in yogurt? Live. But the FDA has made the presence of bacteria in cosmetics illegal, so we can't go that route. (Yes, I know that there is a venture funded beauty company selling a spray with live bacteria; I don't have the venture funding to go down that risky route. So don't @ me about this.)

2. Post-biotics. This is bacteria that has been killed, or lysed. In our Sabbatical Beauty extracts, we normally have the bacteria working on fermenting a natural extract (in the Carol Serum, fermented rice), and then "lyse" the bacteria. This way, your skin gets both the benefit of rice in terms of what it naturally contains, as well as the metabolites of the bacteria, or the predigested rice products of the bacteria, which your skin needs to do the difficult work of cell regeneration properly.

3. Prebiotics, or the actual food for the live good bacteria present on your skin right now.If you feed the good bacteria food it actually knows and loves, it will reproduce madly - helping to improve the dysbiosis of your skin microbiome, and helping with overly oily or dry skin, signs of aging, redness, irritation, acne and more! (Scientists are currently studying the ideal skin prebiotic, or skin "good bacteria" food, and beta glucan is key. Beta Glucan is a key part of my Lift Pressed Serumnow in development (A reformulated Lift Pressed Serum will be comingthe May Sabbatical Beauty Testers. Join the Sabbatical Beauty Facebook groupto find out how to join Testers).

With designing for your skin microbiome in mind, I chose three types of rice extracts which would most benefit your skin!

Idli, fermented South Indian pancakes made of rice, served with the vegetable stew known as sambar

FermentedRice: Fermentation increases the bioavailability of nutrients in the rice bran -- the most nutrient rich part of rice, But also the most difficult to digest.

Fermentation increases the bioavailability of nutrients because the commensal bacteria have already predigested the rice for your skin, and produced their metabolites -- what comes out of their digestion! Your skin needs these metabolites, which act like predigested food to the existing bacteria.

But because no live bacteria are allowed in your cosmetics by the FDA, the bacteria is then lysed,or killed. But because the rice is already predigested, your skin can more easily use all the good stuff in it that works to brighten and tone your skin.

(Fermented RICE: INCI name: Lactobacillus/Oryza Sativa (Rice) Bioferment) Use code SABBATICALto save 10% off this ingredient at our supplier, Formulator Sample Shop).

Existing SB products with fermented rice:

Sake Extract: What happens when rice ferments long enough? You get sake, which is basically rice wine, since alcohol develops from a long fermentation period.

So here: you're getting the results of a long rice fermentation. Sake is the "miracle ingredient" in Japanese skincare; it is said that skincare companies only discovered how miraculous sake is while observing the hands of manual workers making sake. While their faces were elderly and lined, their hands were still young and smooth.

The magic ingredient in sake is the development of kojic acid in the sake process, which inhibits melanin production, thereby lessening the appearance of age spots and evening skin tone.

Sake Extract: INCI Name: Sake Extract. Use code SABBATICAL to save 10% off this ingredient at our supplier, Formulator Sample Shop).

SB Products with Sake

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