I have always been intrigued by science, and owe my gratitude for this beautiful gift to my 4th grade teacher, who has now become part of my cherished memories of my childhood.

True to the revisionist nature in all of us, I carefully separated all the people that I can remember being part of my past into two very practical groups: Heroes and Pinheads. No matter what their gender, race or religion, they either enriched me or ripped me off from reaching my dreams so this was a very simple, and fun, exercise in judgment.

I can't remember anything that my 4th grade teacher taught me, but I do remember her saving me from the claws of fear and ignorance, by asking a simple question, and then taking the lead in answering it herself. So here it is, and I hope it enriches your life the way it has enriched mine -Ms. Gentle Giant asked, what does it take to become a scientist? (50 years of boring classrooms like this one, I thought, so a scientist a will never be). She paced for just a few seconds, cocked her head to the side, took a small breath and proclaimed the answer I would have never thought would reverberate in my soul and identify me as perfectly as nothing else ever did (well, at least until many years later): Curiosity! Scientist are, first and foremost, curious, nosy people that like to take things apart or dig into things until they understand, or find out, how things work, how they are made or why they exist.

What this small wonder of a revelation did to guide my grown up years to finally find Nanotechnology after the age of forty has been almost incredible, especially in terms of how science became the platform from which to approach my career in product development for anti aging skin care products.

At the risk to sound "religious" (I know what you thinking, "aw, puleez, couldn't you chose something safer to be your soundboard, like, perhaps, a communist, or a terrorist?)…. Let me assure you that, the closer you can look at things, the more awesome and wondrous they are, and inexplicably functional, perfect and alive. That's right, contrary to what the mundane simplicity of ignorant deception told you, the devil IS NOT in the details!

Nanotechnology deals with things that are 100 or less nanometers in size. What is a nanometer? It is a unit of measure, just like a foot, or a meter, but smaller -a lot smaller; One nanometer is one billionth of a meter (a meter is about a yard), or 100 thousand times smaller than the width of a human hair. You need a very special microscope to peek into things that are this tiny, and for the last 10 years since this was made possible, one group of scientists that were particularly curious about human skin, what makes it beautiful, jumped into this opportunity and uncovered nothing short of a miracle: the creation, regeneration, and growth of not only skin cells but also the cells in plants, plankton, fungi and everything else that grew, regenerated and defended itself form this big, chaotic but mostly beautiful environment that we call planet earth.

Nanotechnology makes it possible to peek deep into the natural processes that regenerate life, health, preservation and regeneration of itself, and inasmuch as it sounds like a foreign word, nanotechnology IS, by definition, the science that's closest to nature. Nanotechnology makes it possible to imitate nature, therefore the scientists bringing new discoveries to the skin care industry are not bringing something new, but something that's millions of years old that is now possible to remake into a practical and modern convenience: nanotechnology skin care!

Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Your skin is your last barrier of protection, or your skin is like brick and mortar…Hapless analogies like this one are stupidly being repeated by the most respectable looking people! At the hundreds of cosmetic industry seminars, symposiums, conventions and expos that I visited over the years, I came across some of the most interesting people in this planet. From the Intriguing to the exotic to the stupidly ignorant, all of them side by side to perhaps just a handful of cosmetic companies that take their ethical approach to this industry seriously and responsibly.

A retired firefighter was selling moist novelettes, yes, the kind you get at a rib joint for free, as SPF wipes marketed to golfers. His story? He was golfing with his buddies one day, and forgot to bring his Lubriderm, which always protected him form sunburn… you can imagine the rest. He had about four ignoramuses dressed like lawyers attentively listening at his booth, trying to figure out how they could get rich quick with the right marketing story. Bob the firefighter was attracting them with a sign that said "Independently tested and Porfessionally Approved" (neither the poor bastard nor the idiots at his feet noticed the typo, by the way).

A septuagenarian female, with what seemed like rigor mortis on her upper lip and a permanent expression of surprise stuck to her forehead was "educating" a couple of Asian immigrant nail salon owners about the importance of a product to "penetrate the microcondria" if you wanted to see results like the ones she was sporting on her own face. Of course, Fran Marcini's products were "clinically proven"… I could not get the rest because by now I was staring at what looked like could have been a pair of really hot legs, drooping down from her ridiculous mini-skirt.

Hope you are getting the drift. The skin care business is just like any other business, except that it lends itself to deception a lot easier than any other quick money scheme. Remember the snake oil vendors in the old westerns? Or how about the chuckles you get when you consider the gadgetry being sold in the early days since the discovery of electricity, or magnetism? I have an old Sears catalog on my coffee table, and browse it often -especially after a new client asks me to develop his idea of the "next generation fat burning cream". Someday, if I don't find myself needing his happily offered money, for my services as a formulator, I will show him his "secret ingredient" in the 1928 Sears Catalog sold as a cure-all. Oh yes, by the way, if you feel like asking me why I take his money in the first place, I will ask you to stop the earth from spinning for just one second -get it?

Now let me try an analogy, the skin care business is like a box of chocolates….or even better: like the restaurant business! Have you ever heard the story of the couple coming back from a Mexican vacation acting as if they just arrived from the Sur-de-France telling you about their lazy afternoon stroll through this winding cobblestone lined, narrow road, and suddenly coming across this little hole-in the wall mom and pops bistro, where their food was deliciously prepared by Francisco and what was her name honey? Oh gosh she was so funny… ah yes, Maria! The same slop house, on the same pothole ridden street gave me my first and most memorable Montezuma’s Revenge made me vow not to touch food form any place that did not display a big letter A on their door. You get what you deserve for believing without verifying. Not asking you to be a research genius, just to ask yourself if something perhaps isn't just a fowl analogy, or simply too good to be true. I came across http://www.beyondskinscience.com/ many years ago, and put their claims to the test before I committed my trust to their products. You can bet that by now, as a research Director I can be confident that their products are scientifically sound. No snake oil there

High-tech delivery systems and active ingredients have always prompted advanced marketing claims. Yet the future of skin care depends on further advancements, with the practical application of nanotechnology in skin care formulations. As a 15 year veteran in the field of research and development, and a passionate, industry first in this field, I will dedicate several articles on this subject in order to dispel the most common misconstructions about nanotechnology skin care and to inform and educate the public,. I promise that I will try to control my inevitable scientific terminology remembering that this is a blog, and that my intention is not to turn it into a schollarly white paper while staying accurate and scientifically true.

So here is the inside track on what's the next step in skin care formulations:

• R&D in the most up to date cosmetic labs is borrowing ideas from the medical field, materials science and food and environmental industries for future skin care ingredients and delivery system innovations.
• It will be much more difficult to introduce a new ingredient to the market, due to growing global regulations, so companies will look much closer at how the "old" ingredients could work better. Enter Nanotechnology: You can make a tried and true ingredient like Vitamin C, for example, to perform 4 to 10 times better by reducing its particle size so that it can be delivered to the skin instead of laying on the surface, trapped in the old pile of waxy smear that we called "cold cream"
• Similar metal or polymer microneedles being researched in the U.S. and Europe for use in cost-effective, mass immunizations may enable new delivery methods for antiaging actives and other skin care ingredients.

An interesting article on nanotechnology being used on skin whitening products, for example,  can be found at http://www.beyondskinscience.com/skincare/clearskincare.html since Beyond Skin Science has focused on nanotech based formulas for almost ten years.

More on this later.

Skin care! Starting with President Clinton's funding for research, the National Nanotechnolgy Initiative now enjoys the fastest growing budget in the science arena. Hard to believe that these tiny carbon molecules, otherwise known as Bucky Balls of Fulleneres, could play such an important role in this country's modernization, but one only has to look at the quantity and effectiveness of all the wonder drugs that the biotech companies have developed, and will understand why they have so much to thank the discovery of a single carbon molecule, invisible to the naked eye (one nanometer). Developing the technology to manipulate ingredients at such a small scale has already led to so many new discoveries that nanotechnology is now touted as the new industrial revolution. Beyond Skin Science was the first company in the US to benefit from new skin care ingredients, and the effectiveness of their products proved it to thousands of women all over the world.