Hyaluronic Acid — The rooster comb problem

Until 1985, hyaluronic acid came out of rooster combs and cost a fortune. A patent filed in Yokohama is the reason it sits in a moisturiser rather than an operating theatre.

A clear glass flask and pipette on a flat grey ground in raking light, shallow depth of field

Hyaluronic acid holds water. That part was never in dispute — it is already in your skin, your joints and your eyes, and it holds a great deal more water than it weighs. The question was never whether it worked. The question was where to get it.

Until the mid-1980s, the answer was animals. Rooster combs mostly — the red crest on a cockerel happens to be unusually rich in it — along with bovine eye tissue. Both took an enormous quantity of raw material to yield very little finished product, and the cost put hyaluronic acid firmly in the medical category. It went into eye surgery. It did not go into moisturiser.

The cheaper route, and why it did not work

発酵

There was a cheaper route in principle. Certain streptococcus bacteria produce hyaluronic acid as a matter of course, and fermenting bacteria is inexpensive. The difficulty was that the strains which produced it well were hemolytic — they also produced streptolysin, a protein that destroys blood cells — and separating the two reliably enough to put the result on somebody’s face was not a solved problem.

On 9 May 1985, three chemists at Shiseido in Yokohama — Hidemichi Akasaka, Hisayuki Komasaki and Takayuki Arai — filed a patent on a non-hemolytic mutant strain that fermented hyaluronic acid without the contaminant. It was granted in 1989 as US 4,801,539.

That is the whole reason hyaluronic acid appears in a thirty-five dollar jar instead of a hospital. Not a new molecule. Not a new claim. A better method of making the same thing, which took the cost down by orders of magnitude and took the roosters out of it entirely.

Where it sits in the range

配合

It appears in three of the four formulas here, at more than one molecular weight, because different sizes sit at different depths. It is not in the cleanser. There is no sense putting a humectant into something designed to be rinsed off thirty seconds later.

Which is also why a vegan range can use it at all. That was not the objective in 1985 — it was a side effect of solving a cost problem. A good number of the better outcomes arrive that way.

Hyaluronic acid holds water — it is already in your skin, your joints and your eyes, and it holds far more water than it weighs. Whether it worked was never the question. Where to get it was.

Until the mid-1980s the answer was animals: rooster combs mostly, along with bovine eye tissue. Both took an enormous quantity of raw material for very little finished product, which kept hyaluronic acid in the medical category. It went into eye surgery, not moisturiser.

The cheaper route, and why it did not work

発酵

Certain streptococcus bacteria make hyaluronic acid on their own, and fermenting bacteria is cheap. The problem was that the best-producing strains were hemolytic — they also made streptolysin, which destroys blood cells — and separating the two reliably was not solved.

On 9 May 1985, three chemists at Shiseido in Yokohama — Hidemichi Akasaka, Hisayuki Komasaki and Takayuki Arai — patented a non-hemolytic mutant strain that fermented it without the contaminant. Granted in 1989 as US 4,801,539.

That is the whole reason it appears in a thirty-five dollar jar instead of a hospital. Not a new molecule, not a new claim — a better method of making the same thing.

Where it sits in the range

配合

Three of the four formulas here, at more than one molecular weight, because different sizes sit at different depths. Not in the cleanser — there is no sense putting a humectant into something rinsed off thirty seconds later.

It is also why a vegan range can use it at all. That was not the objective in 1985; it was a side effect of solving a cost problem. A good number of the better outcomes arrive that way.

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