Good Silicon+® is our patented carrier technology designed to make skincare ingredients more effective. It protects ingredients from degradation to keep them in their active form, boosts their skin absorption, and releases them over time.
You’ve seen it before: skincare products have an impressive list of ingredients, but they just don’t work — they may feel nice on your skin but they have no or very little noticeable effect.
The most likely reason: the ingredients aren’t bioavailable.
The thing is, in order to do what they are supposed to do, skincare ingredients need to meet two key criteria:
1) They need to be absorbed by the skin. The finest ingredients in the world won’t do much for you if they just sit on top of your skin (unless it’s a sunscreen).
2) They need to remain in their active form for long enough to perform their intended function.
The Formulator’s Challenge
Skin absorption and keeping ingredients in their active form can be challenging to achieve.
First, your skin is a natural biological barrier that’s really good at protecting you from external substances. To be bioavailable, skincare ingredients need to be able to pass the stratum corneum, the outermost layer of skin.
Second, skincare ingredients are easily degraded and made ineffective by external factors like water and air, so they have to be protected to retain their active form.
Enter Good Silicon+® - a unique technology designed to make active ingredients bioavailable. It’s based on delivery technology that our founder and her R&D team developed over the course of almost ten years for the needle-free delivery of pharmaceutical ingredients.
Silicon + Lipids + Amino Acids = Good Silicon+
Good Silicon+® is made of skin-friendly natural Silicon, lipids, and amino acids. It wraps around ingredients to protect them from oxidation or degradation and keep them in their active, effective form.
Silicon is NOT the same as Silicone
Silicon is the second most abundant element in the earth’s crust, after oxygen. You can find it in all kinds of foods and drinks such as cereals or beer. Not to be confused with Silicone - with an ‘e’ at the end -, which is a synthetic polymer used in many skin and hair products. Silicones have got a bad name in recent years (even though there is little scientific evidence that Silicones are bad for your skin).
Good Science Beauty products don’t contain Silicones and Good Silicon+ has nothing to do with synthetic polymers. Good Silicon+ is based on elemental Silicon – without an ‘e’ at the end -, which occurs in nature and is an important trace element in the human body.
Good Silicon+® protects ingredients from degradation
Many skincare ingredients, such as Vitamin A or Vitamin E, are unstable. Which means they break down when exposed to oxygen or light and lose their efficacy. Good Silicon+ creates a protective shell of silicon, lipids and amino acids that stabilizes molecules.
Good Silicon+® boosts skin absorption
The skin’s protective barrier, the stratum corneum, consists of fibrous cells called corneocytes, and a lipid matrix. Lipids are fatty molecules that act as the mortar for the brickwork of corneocytes. While many small molecules are able to permeate directly through the corneocytes, most other molecules need to use the lipid matrix as pathway across the stratum corneum.
Fat and water don’t mix. Which is why hydrophilic (= water-loving) ingredients like L-ascorbic acid (Vitamin C) or Hyaluronic Acid struggle to cross the stratum corneum via the lipid matrix. That’s where the lipids in Good Silicon+ come in. Put simply, they wrap hydrophilic molecules in fat, which facilitates their absorption through the skin’s lipid matrix.
Another feature of Good Silicon+ that helps draw ingredients into the skin: Good Silicon+ particles have a positive charge. The skin has a natural negative charge - and opposites attract …!
Good Silicon+® dissolves into the bioavailable form of Silicon
As the Good Silicon+ particles slowly dissolve, their ingredients are released over time, giving them time to work where they’ll be most beneficial.
And finally, Good Silicon+ becomes a beneficial ingredient itself. It dissolves into orthosilicic acid, the absorbable form of Silicon, which supports collagen production and general skin health.
So this is why Good Silicon+ is so good. And that’s what makes Good Science Beauty skin care so unique.