Using my chemistry background for skincare
In February 2012, I moved back to Manhattan from Tokyo, after living there for 3 years, and noticed that my skin had changed due to a shift in diet. I’m now much older than I was back then and realize how ridiculous this mini freakout actually was, but it led to a cool idea and some good knowledge, so I guess I have no complaints.
Salmon contains dimethylaminoethanol (DMAE), a compound associated with enhancing skin firmness, green tea contains epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG), a powerful antioxidant, and wakame contains hyaluronidase inhibitors, molecules that protect the skin’s elasticity. The list goes on of all the foods that I had suddenly stopped consuming that were most likely sparing my skin from the effects of Roppongi Hills nightlife. Welcome to the life of a 22-year-old finance expat living in Tokyo with money for the first time in her life.
Anyways, without high levels of these ingredients in my diet, my skin no longer received the protection it once did, leaving it susceptible to the natural signs of aging. To act on this, like any normal person would do, I began making my own skincare in my parents kitchen, using what I remembered from my chemistry degree to identify ways to inhibit the biochemical reactions that cause wrinkles, sagging skin, and all the other things that make us uglier as we age.
A year a half into this journey of nerdiness meeting superficiality, I had managed to try out 15 different lotion recipes aimed at addressing the key biochemical processes associated with skin aging - protein attack from free-radicals, enhanced activity of MMPs (enzymes that degrade collagen and elastin), and glycation, a process whereby sugar molecules “randomly” bond to the skin’s protein fibers.
Each recipe contained a mix of ingredients derived from food. Antioxidants, such as alpha lipoic acid, help protect the skin from free-radical damage, anti-glycation agents, such a L-carnosene, defend collagen fibers from sugar molecules, and elastase inhibitors prevent enzymes from breaking down elastin. The list goes on of ingredients that can be topically applied to directly combat one of the many aging offenders.
Eventually, I came up with my vision for “the Lab”, a skincare company that offers preventative, anti-aging products to young adults through an in store mix-and-match experience. Think Pinkberry for lotions – the lotion base is the frozen yogurt and the anti-aging ingredients are the toppings. Depending on the hydrophilicity of the selected ingredients, they’re either dissolved in water first or mixed directly into the lotion.
And this is how I ended up at Columbia Business School. And while I didn’t end up building “the Lab”, it certainly has had a lasting impact on my classmates, as our WhatsApp group to this day is still called “the guys from the Lab”.
Jokes aside, I still think it’s an awesome idea, but if I were to revisit this, I’d go down the consumer robotics/hardware direction with hyper-personalized one-day-use pods.
What I studied in college
My college experience was all about chemistry. After surviving the first few years of general chemistry and physics courses, which were purposefully difficult to help weed out any undeserving medical school hopefuls, I got into the good stuff. The second half of my undergraduate studies were filled with courses like analytical chemistry, medicinal chemistry, brain chemistry, and my all-time-favorite, physical chemistry.
I purposefully leave out physical organic chemistry, as this class humbled me more than anything else I’ve experienced to date. Think physics - thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, etc., - but for organic chemistry reactions. This one was not for me.
Now while my chemistry career ended upon graduation - I did think about pursuing a PhD, but the truth is, spending the rest of my life focused on exactly one receptor type felt more like a prison sentence than an achievement - I still think it’s the most interesting subject matter out there. And I’ll happily debate team physics on this any day.
So, in 2009, I left this behind for a career in finance and then for a career in tech and maybe one day for a career in something else, but the truth us, sometimes I feel like the “distracted boyfriend” meme where the other girl is the science life I didn’t choose.
Some research I did
For the last 2 years of collage, I worked as an undergraduate research assistant in the Neuroscience Drug Discovery lab at Vanderbilt. The focus of “my” research (“my” is loose here - I basically followed around a PhD candidate named Tom Bridges who told me what to do), was on developing a series of small compound potentiators to increase the activity of the M1 muscarinic acetylcholine receptor. This receptor is a promising target in the treatment of Alzheimer’s Disease and by selective activation of the M1 subtype, neurons that are still functional can potentially slow the progression of the disease by increased activity. That said, science moves fast, this was a very long time ago, so it’s possible none of this is true anymore :)
