Tag Archives: Using nanotechnology to unlock a fountain of bul

A nanotechnology wrinkle

A cosmetics ad (more about that in a minute) came back to memory this morning as I read Michael Berger’s Nanowerk Spotlight article (Using nanotechnology to unlock a fountain of bull) about a Thomson Reuters report on nanotechnology and the cosmetics industry. From the article,

Two days ago we ran a press release from Thomson Reuters about a brief report they compiled on patent data relating to nanotechnology in the cosmetics industry. …

It already begins with the sensational title: Can Nanotech Unlock The Fountain of Youth? (pdf). That certainly catches the eye of the layperson. What exactly face creams, shampoos and sunscreens have to do with the “fountain of youth” remains unexplained. Oh, and they do make a reference to ‘remote concepts’ like nanorobotics. So let your imagination run wild! Little NanoStretchinators (trademark pending Nanowerk) that remove wrinkles from underneath the skin maybe? Or the fully automated Follicle-NanoSeeder that restores the shining body of the male scalp?

After poking a little more fun at the report, Berger hones in on distortions such as this,

Not a word about potential risks, or health and environmental concerns. But when you look at these three quoted studies you get a different message. The initiative by the EPA they are referring to actually “will determine whether these materials present a potential environmental hazard or exposure over their life cycles, and how these materials, when used in products, may be modified or managed to avoid or mitigate potential human health or ecological impacts.”

Berger goes on to provide more eye opening references and comments. As for the ad I’d seen, it’s been a few months since I first saw it in one of my local daily newspapers but I clipped it since it featured this copy:

Euoko’s Eye Contour Nanolift
Like millions of very tiny plastic surgeons

Seems like a nanobot reference, doesn’t it?

It caught me eye because these days, it’s not often (almost never) that you see a cosmetics company overtly touting a nanotechnology product.  L’Oréal doesn’t mention ‘nanosomes’ after years of using the term in its marketing campaigns for its Revitalift ads (no nanosomes on the company’s Canadian website when I checked it this morning, July 15, 2010). If you’re interested in “millions of tiny plastic surgeons”, you can pay $320 CAD for 15 ml online here. Sadly, the website makes no mention of the plastic surgeons but there is this,

The cocktail for the post-injection, post-laser, post-surgery, post-peel era. Millions of lifting nanoparticles work with South American native rose moss and Asiatic pennywort to sustain instant and long-term surface smoothness. Lupine lipopeptides from France maximize optical properties of the skin to accentuate radiance. [emphasis mine]

On other wrinkling nanotechnology news, a news item on Nanowerk features this,

As a sign of aging or in a suit, wrinkles are almost never welcome, but two papers in the current issue of Physical Review Letters (“Smooth Cascade of Wrinkles at the Edge of a Floating Elastic Film” and “Draping Films: A Wrinkle to Fold Transition”) offer some perspective on what determines their size and shape in soft materials.

The experiments offer complimentary insights into how defects, such as an edge or a fold, influence the presence of wrinkles and could prove helpful in understanding the formation of wrinkles in biological tissue.

I’m curious as to funding details for this work being done by two different teams of physicists at the University of Massachusetts but I haven’t been able to track details. I was not able to access the research articles themselves and that’s usually where you can find those details.