Look closely at a cosmetic package or a product page and you will see small annotations beside the ingredient names: moisturising ingredient, skin-conditioning ingredient. The words are familiar, yet few people could say exactly what they mean. What counts as conditioning and what counts as moisturising, and when these ingredients appear in a serum for the hands, what is it reasonable to expect?
Soie chooses its words carefully when it talks about ingredients. A cosmetic is not a medicine, and there are clear limits to what it can do for the skin. Describing those limits honestly is, we believe, the responsibility of a brand that asks people to regard their hands as a subject of beauty care in the same way as the face.
This article uses the EGF and KGF (skin-conditioning ingredients) and the peptides (moisturising ingredients) in Soie's hand serum as examples, and explains what a formula designed for the hands actually means, in the language of cosmetics.
Conditioning versus moisturising
Cosmetic ingredients are labelled according to the purpose for which they are included. A moisturising ingredient gives moisture to the skin, helps prevent dryness and keeps the skin supple. A skin-conditioning ingredient is included to keep the skin in good condition, to refine its texture and to leave it smooth.
Both act on the surface of the skin, the stratum corneum, as cosmetic ingredients do. Claims about changing something deeper in the skin, or about remedying a condition, lie outside what a cosmetic may say, and Soie does not make them. The annotations beside an ingredient name exist to state precisely what role the product plays as a cosmetic.
Knowing this distinction when choosing a hand serum lets you read what a product has been designed to do, rather than what its marketing implies.
EGF and KGF as skin-conditioning ingredients
Soie's Enlight Hand Serum contains two skin-conditioning ingredients, EGF and KGF. On the full ingredient list they appear as oligopeptide-1 and oligopeptide-41 respectively. As the names suggest, both are peptides.
Soie placed these two at the core of its hand serum out of consideration for the back of the hand. The skin there has little sebum and is thin, and it meets washing, friction and UV light every day. Dryness and the changes that come with age tend to appear there before they appear on the face. Designing for this part of the body means not only giving moisture but also keeping the skin in good condition, and skin-conditioning ingredients are what support that second aim.
What Soie promises is a formula that moisturises mature hands and keeps them in good condition. We stop there. Declining to say more is a matter of honesty for a cosmetic, and also an expression of a conviction: that the beauty of the hands is made by daily habit, accumulated over time, rather than by any single ingredient.
Peptides as moisturising ingredients
Alongside EGF and KGF, Enlight Hand Serum contains several further peptides. On the ingredient list they appear under names such as acetyl decapeptide-3, oligopeptide-34 and caprooyl tetrapeptide-3, and they are included as moisturising ingredients that give moisture to the skin of the hands.
The word peptide has a modern ring to it. Soie's reason for including peptides, however, has nothing to do with fashion and everything to do with how hands are used. They are washed many times a day and lose moisture at every wash. Within an approach that replenishes that moisture with moisturising ingredients rather than covering it with a temporary film of oil, peptides were chosen, together with five ceramides, as ingredients that layer moisture into the stratum corneum.
Bringing moisturising and skin-conditioning ingredients together in a single serum is what a formula designed for the hands means. Where a hand cream mainly protects by preventing dryness with a film of oil, a hand serum is built on water and beauty ingredients to bring out moisture, smoothness and radiance. The difference between the two is set out in what sets a hand serum apart from hand cream.
Speaking accurately about ingredients
Soie has chosen not to overstate what its ingredients do. We describe, quietly, what is possible within the labels skin-conditioning and moisturising. This is not reticence for its own sake. It is the posture we think is needed if hand beauty is to take root as a habit people can trust.
Rather than being drawn to a product by the name of an ingredient, look at how the product regards the hands. Does it start from the difference between the back of the hand and the palm? Can it be used after every wash without stickiness? Does it consider both conditioning and moisturising? An ingredient formula is a statement of how a brand sees the hands.
With any new product, try a small amount on the inside of the arm first, and stop using it if you notice redness, itching or irritation, consulting a dermatologist if necessary. The full ingredient list is published on each product page.
Where Soie's hand serum fits in
Soie's Enlight Hand Serum is a beauty serum made only for the hands, balancing EGF and KGF (skin-conditioning ingredients) with five ceramides and peptides (moisturising ingredients). Over 95% of its ingredients are of natural origin, including more than 20 botanical extracts such as rosemary, aloe, chamomile and lavender, and plant-derived oils such as squalane and jojoba seed oil.
Ingredients acquire their meaning only inside a habit: moisturising the hands after washing them. The questions we are asked most often are gathered in our hand beauty Q&A. We hope that, beyond the names of the ingredients, the way of thinking about beautiful hands comes through.
