LÉ Blog

Whether you are a skincare newbie or skincare junkie, you’re bound to hear about peptides. It’s that exotic ingredient that shows up in your anti-aging creams and serums that usually comes with a stinging price tag. Yet even for this fancy, seemingly high-tech ingredient category you’ll still have to avoid some duds. The reality is as chemists, you can synthesize a gajillion different peptides out there but very few actually do anything for the skin. So how do you as a consumer know? We proba...

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For 2021, we made a goal to flush out our expert series. Let’s be real, we can answer all things skincare (minus pregnancy questions), but you’ve also got questions about hair and makeup too. For our first 2021 expert, we’re bringing out the big guns with our friend @cosmetic_chemist, haircare chemist and the cohost of the Beauty Brains podcast Valerie George. The Beauty Brains happens to be one of the OG cosmetic chemists blogs, and provides a wealth of knowledge on cosmetic chemistry, espec...

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Do thermal water sprays really work? Does spritzing that magical hot spring water provide any proven skin benefits? Should I go with Avene or La Roche Posay thermal water? These are just a few of the questions we have gotten about thermal water based skin mists. We’ll admit, before our friends asked about decoding thermal waters, it wasn’t a topic we really thought much about. Some of the concepts and outrageous claims that came with them felt like it had BS all over it. We even ran a quick i...

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2020 was the year for stay at home self care, which pretty much led to a huge hunt for all things diet and wellness including collagen ingestibles. In fact, there’s so much collagen stuff out there that there’s even recipes like collagen cupcakes.... But seriously, as of Jan 2021, is there any data suggesting to give collagen a look? Strap in folks, we gotta try to organize a little chaos here. We’ll walk you through what data to look at, what products to avoid, and what to look for in your c...

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In our entrepreneurship journey, we have had the opportunity to meet with many other awesome founders. We want to use our platform to shine a light on the great work that these founders are doing. We first met the founders and power couple of Young King Hair Care Stefan & Cora through the Target accelerator program. Young King is a hair care line for multicultural boys (a category often neglected) that's really for anyone with textured hair and kinky curls. Here's the full interview on Stefan...

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We talked about what an awesome and multi-functional ingredient vitamin C, L-ascorbic acid (L-AA), is. It’s no surprise that many brands have their own take on vitamin C making the L-AA landscape quite vast. But not to fear! L-ascorbic acid products can actually be broken down into three types. So today, let’s walk through the different product types and learn how to incorporate them in your routine. You can check out products mentioned in this article here. Classic Water Based Serum Water-ba...

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We decode a lot of ingredients on Instagram, but one of the hardest categories to decode and do a deep dive on are proprietary ingredients. The other frustrating thing is that most proprietary molecule products usually come with a premium price tag. But there is one specific scenario that justifies premium serums — a well done testing plan with solid results. Makings of a Proprietary Ingredient There are many stages to validating a good ingredient. Generally speaking, you test on a petri dish...

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