Cosmeceuticals: Safety, Efficacy and Potential Benefits

Background

Pharmaceuticals are drugs or drug(s)-containing products that prevent, mitigate, treat disease and /or affect the anatomy or physiological functions of the body. ‘Cosmeceuticals’ is a deliberate portmanteau of these two terms. ‘Cosmeceuticals’ are intended to connote drug-like benefits and perceptions from an otherwise cosmetic product (Oricha, 2010). Applied on the skin as usual cosmetic does, these cosmeceutical products are fortified with natural ingredients that could improve the skin's biological function just like pharmaceuticals. Essentially, cosmeceuticals bridge the gap between drugs and cosmetics.

Dr Albert M. Kligman coined the word “cosmeceuticals” in an address to Society of Cosmetic Chemists in 1984. (Kligman, 2005). Now, the term cosmeceutical was used to refer to skin products from simple moisturisers (as they themselves have effects on skin hydration) to prescription retinoids and almost everything in between. However, in most circumstances, the term cosmeceutical is solely reserved for enhanced moisturisers with active ingredients that provide substantial benefits to the skin.

Even till today, the cosmeceutical category is still considered not well defined thus ambiguous for pharmaceutical regulation and control. The term ‘cosmeceuticals’ is not recognized by US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) under the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act although being widely used in pharmaceutical and cosmetic markets (Draelos, 2009). Awareness of establishing quality control, industry standards and regulations in cosmetics or cosmeceuticals were recently initiated. To prove the significance of beneficial skin effect of a cosmeceuticals can be difficult if not impossible, compared to clinical trials of drugs of other route of administrations: there are simply no placebos to begin with as anything that is applied to the skin will have an effect in some ways on top of the baseline placebo effect (Sommerfeld, 2007)