I was made aware of a YouTube video that compared a product I developed at NeoGenesis to a product manufactured for ReVive. Always looking forward to learning new things, I had a look at the video. Penn Smith is not a name I recognized, so I looked her up.

The first thing I learned is that she works for Jeff Bezos at Amazon, selling products for the skin.

Notice I didn’t say “skincare products.” I said products for the skin. Why? Look at the first product I saw her selling:

She’s selling a product with Diazolidinyl urea, which is an antimicrobial preservative that works by forming formaldehyde in cosmetic products. People exposed to such formaldehyde-releasing ingredients may develop a number of problems, including contact dermatitis, allergy and cancer. PEG is a poor choice too – causing contact dermatitis. Daily cleansing with such a product is really a very poor choice.

And here is Penn smith selling a product for Amazon that she says “I haven’t tried it.”

Salespeople who are informed and educate us, and make thoughtful recommendations are very important. That’s not what she’s doing – first she’s selling something detrimental to our health, and in the second instance she’s selling something of which she knows nothing. I could go on, but let’s look now at the product she is comparing to Recovery by NeoGenesis, the technology (S2RM) and product that I developed. BTW, I’m a scientist and have many peer reviewed, PubMed listed science articles supporting what I’m saying (some of my articles are here, and my scientifically reviewed book is here).

Here’s the Recovery product that I developed with the S2RM technology that I started developing while a professor at the University of California, San Diego. It has been a long journey coming to the point where I could develop this technology, and many people along my journey have taught me so much – I pay tribute to all those who helped me, including our team at NeoGenesis.

Let’s now look at the product Penn Smith is selling – ReVive Ultimate Serum.

I looked at the ingredients of this product and was taken aback by how poor, whomever formulated it, the formulator performed. Why would a company cheapen its products. So I had a look at the company. ReVive Skincare is owned by a private equity group called Tengram Capital Partners, a PE firm led by Willam Sweedler, a group with financial troubles. They have a huge amount of debt and are therefore selling-off portfolio companies and cutting costs at the companies they still own. The ReVive Ultimate Serum formulation is one means by which they are cutting cost. If you’d like to learn how private equity is stripping the quality of companies and their products, two good books provide some of the details, including one by Gretchen Morgenson.

Now to the product. Penn Smith calls Ultimate Serum, “A dupe for TNS.” Yes, she calls it a “dupe.” Of course the definition of “dupe” is to trick or deceive. So apparently Penn Smith has been hired by a private equity group to sell a “dupe.”

Looking at the ingredients in ReVive Ultimate Serum, I can tell you why this product is not as good as SkinMedica TNS or NeoGenesis Recovery.

Poor choice of ingredients in this product include:

1.Tetradecyl Aminobutyroylvalylaminobutyric Urea Trifluoroacetate – EWG = 10 (https://www.ewg.org/skindeep/ingredients/862173-TETRADECYL_AMINOBUTYROYLVALYLAMINOBUTYRIC_UREA_TRIFLUOROACETATE/)

Common concerns (from EWG)

See how this product scores for common concerns.

• MODERATE – Cancer
• HIGH – Allergies & Immunotoxicity
• HIGH – Developmental and Reproductive Toxicity
• HIGH – Use Restrictions

2. Bone Marrow Mesenchymal Stem Cell exosomes (BMSCe) are a poor choice, including because of oncogenic potential of their exosomes – see the following paper, section “Safety and efficacy considerations: ADSCs preferred Over BMSCs” – (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8437473/),

3. Isolated exosomes have been lyophilized (freeze drying procedure) that renders suboptimal exosomes with damaged proteins in the core, and denuded (stripped away) proteins and polysaccharides on its surface (https://drgregmaguireskincare.blog/2023/06/18/why-neogenesis-doesnt-lyophyilize-freeze-dry-our-secretome-exosome-s2rm-fresh-is-better/). It’s a cheap way to have exosomes in your product, and private equity likes cheap. They don’t work well though.

4. Many of the active molecules in conditioned media from stem cells are in the soluble fraction, not in the exosomes. Using the soluble fraction in combination with exosomes is optimal – it’s more expensive to do it this way, but much more efficacious (see, for example, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1529943022000353#bib0035). The soluble fraction contains many molecule types, including small heat shock proteins (sHSP) that repair other proteins and fatty acids that inhibit COX-2, reducing pain and inflammation.

5. Polysorbate 20 – skin irritant, there are better choices for emulsification

6. Butylene glycol – again, a skin irritant, better choice are available

7. Pentylene glycol– another irritant

If you add a number of skin irritants to the formula, and have people use it daily, it’s obviously a sub-optimal product. And comparing cheap freeze dried exosomes from bone marrow stem cells to the molecules used in SkinMedica TNS (from fibroblasts) and NeoGenesis (from fibroblasts and skin derived mesenchymal stem cells) that haven’t been damaged and aren’t derived from dangerous bone marrow cells shows her ignorance and/or duplicity.

It cost more to use fresh exosomes that haven’t been damaged by freeze drying, something private equity doesn’t like to pay for, but companies using this technology have much better technology and more effective products.