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When it comes to achieving the plumpest, bounciest, glowiest skin, you’ve probably heard terms like “exosomes” and “stem cells” floating around your aesthetician’s office – or more likely, in your group chats. The latest buzz word to enter the beauty-sphere is “secretomes,” otherwise known as stem cells that have been secreted and banked in a lab. The important (and exciting) piece to know is that these secretomes come from you, making them the ideal candidate for skin and hair rejuvenation, as they are a bio-identical match, something you can’t find at an online retailer or in your favorite beauty shop.
When microneedled or lasered into skin and scalp, they deliver growth factors, cytokines and peptides that do everything from stimulate tissue repair to reduce inflammation to revitalize dormant hair follicles. I recently went on a secretome journey with Acorn, the innovative company behind this new procedure. Here’s what I learned…
We like
- The most promising of its kind in the market
- You’re paying for multiple uses over the course of time
- Everything is natural and safe because it’s from your own body
- Collection process is painless
- Treatments have minimal downtime
We don't like
- Initial cost is pricey
- For best results, you need to do more than treatment
- While participating practitioners are growing, they aren’t everywhere yet.
How Are Secretomes Harvested?
While you may imagine needing a gnarly blood draw, the process is totally uninvasive. Fifty strands of hair are collected from your head (try plucking out a hair from your head – it feels like nothing). Your hair follicles have a high concentration of stem cells which is why they’re ideal for this collection.
Once they’re harvested, they’re “banked” or “cryogenically preserved” in a lab (if you’ve had a baby and banked his or her chord blood, this might sound familiar). There, they’re placed in a special environment to produce a high volume of growth factors, from which the nutritious elements are skimmed. It’s formulated into a dry powder that can then be re-constituted to yield a fresh batch that can then be used on your skin or scalp in a practitioner’s office.
This process is how the secretomes stay stable, which is key. For contrast, if creams and serums that contain these components aren’t kept in ideal environments, there will be rapid degradation (donor human stem cells can break down in three months).
In terms of your biological age, you may be wondering how your “old” stem cells will show up for you when you need them. As a middle aged woman, I was curious (and nervous) about how my middle aged cells would perform. The good news is that your cells will be secreted longer in order to compensate for biological age.
I was told that all cells get the chance to perform – older cells are simply given a longer period of time to achieve the same optimal levels of nutrients as younger cells. To take it a step further, Acorn has internal metrics that determine when these cells are ready for primetime – and this includes everything from exosome concentration to concentration of protein (or growth factors) and they also need to establish a lack of bacteria. No matter your age, your cells won’t be released until they hit that threshold. So rest assured, this is an equal opportunity cell collection.
Why Are They More Effective Than Anything Else on the Market?
Since nothing else in the market is your exact biological match, it’s important to understand their limitations. Exosomes that are harvested from plants are a far cry from your own biology, so they’re probably the least effective. PDRN (found in the popular salmon sperm treatments) are a 95% match to human DNA – but that’s actually not that close (for reference, fungus is around 89%). And even stem cells from donor humans are also different from yours – while they’re closer than say, apple stem cells, our bodies are efficient at identifying simply what belongs to us and what doesn’t.
It was explained to me that everything in biology is like a lock and key – if it’s not a biological match, it probably won’t open the door. Because secretomes are a “lock and key match,” there are a number of things they can do for skin and hair; growth factors stimulate the production of one’s own cell’s biology by creating “cues” to regenerate collagen, hyaluronic acid, elastin – all the building blocks of cells that we know and love. Similarly, this has a lot of promise for hair restoration as they foster hair growth in a way that feels recognizable to the body.
What My Experience Was Like:
As mentioned, the follicle collection was easy and done in a few minutes by a member of the team. It then took a few weeks for them to become secretomes that would be ready for use. From there I chose a practitioner in my area that I trusted (Acorn works with loads of top practitioners across the country) and went in for a treatment.
Having chosen to pair them with microneedling, the treatment was just like any other time I’ve gone in to do this service – but this time, my secretomes were needled in, and then topically spread on my skin at the end. And since your secretomes are bottled into four vials, and they are designed to each be dipped into multiple times, you can do multiple treatments over the course of however long you like to space things out.
Have I seen a difference? As I’ve always had a difficult time qualifying results since I see myself everyday, I tend to rely on unprompted comments from others. And if “what have you been doing to your skin?” is any measure of success, I will say that I plan to use up all of my vials.
Is It Worth It?
Yes. Absolutely. To collect the follicles is under one thousand dollars (not cheap, but remember, you are getting multiple uses out of them) and then banking them costs less than a Netflix subscription (about $190 a year). You will pay for your treatment and that varies across providers (having gone to a well-known Beverly Hills plastic surgeon for mine, you can bet that he was on the higher side). If you’re unsure if this is something you want to invest your money and time in, you can book a consultation with Acorn to determine what you should and could do with them. Bottom line: if you’re curious, it’s a treatment at least worth exploring. After all, it’s literally made for you.
