KOSMETIC IMMUNITY | BETA GLUCAN RECOVERY SERUM

This review was originally part of my blog article titled, My Favorite Humectant Serums From Paula's Choice, The Inkey List, Ghost Democracy and More! You can catch the full piece here.

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Throughout the colder months between October and March, I really struggle with keeping my skin from becoming dry and dehydrated.

In November, I kicked off the annual dry skin season with a pair of articles on the best face creams for dry skin and all skin types in the cold, leading with a piece titled, Winter Moisturizers Part I – Some of the Best Face Creams for Dry Skin and All Skin Types in Cold Weather. A week later, I rounded out my list of the best dry skin moisturizers in Winter Moisturizers Part 2 — available to read here.

In mid-December, I followed those up with a piece on my favorite hydrating face mists titled, Favorite Face Mists For Keeping Skin Hydrated In The Cold – Best Face Mists, Best Hydrating Toners For Dry, Dehydrated Skin.

Richer face creams and hydrating mists are indispensable, essentials in every winter skincare routine. And, at least with the moisturizers, are fairly common. But the one true essential for maintaining skin health in the harsh cold months is a really good humectant product, usually a Hyaluronic Acid serum.

While Hyaluronic Acid is far and away the most popular and most sought-after of humectants, it is by no means the only one. Humectant ingredients that are also effective at preventing trans-epidermal water loss and subsequent dehydration include: Beta Glucan, Butylene Glycol, Centella Asiatica, Polyglutamic Acid, Glycerin, Aloe Vera, Snow Mushroom and even seaweed.

I think it’s just that Hyaluronic Acid was the new, sexy humectant popularized in one-note serums — treatments focused on a single potent active ingredient. Brands like Deciem’s The Ordinary and The Inkey List were founded on ingredient education and super affordable one-note serums. Among the most sought after are The Ordinary’s $6 Niacinamide 10% + Zinc 1% and the $8 Hyaluronic Acid Serum from The Inkey List — which I include in the line-up below.

Maintaining proper hydration levels year-round is essential if skin is going to function at its peak. Healthy functioning skin is better able to defend against external aggressors like pollution, UV, and free radical attacks. And healthy skin is better fortified against aging. So while it may seem slick to say that a humectant serum that helps keep skin hydrated is an effective anti-aging product, it’s not really a stretch at all.

Dry, dehydrated skin is certainly unhealthy; it can’t behave as it should. You may be asking yourself, as I once did, what the difference is between dry skin and dehydrated skin. Well, permit me to explore those differences.

What’s the difference between dry skin and dehydrated skin?

For the answer to that vexing questing, as I most often do, I turned to the experts on the Paula’s Choice Research Team for insights. There’s a superb piece on the Paula’s Choice site titled, What is Dehydrated Skin & How to Choose the Best Products. Here is an excerpt:

Dehydrated skin often looks and feels like dry skin all over your face, but there's a major difference between the two: dehydrated skin is usually a temporary concern (with various surprising causes) and dry skin typically doesn't change over time. If you have dehydrated skin, your skin may also produce a normal or even excessive amount of oil on its surface.
"Dehydrated skin" is something we’re asked about frequently. It seems there’s a lot of confusion about what this skin concern is about. A major part of the confusion is that the term "dehydrated skin" is often used interchangeably with "dry skin" or "combination skin" but they are not the same! Dehydrated skin can occur in all skin types and is not exclusive to those with dry skin or combination skin.
The Difference Between Dry Skin and Dehydrated Skin
Having classically dry skin is easy to recognize. Dry skin frequently feels tight and dry, with no oil anywhere to be seen. This situation rarely fluctuates; skin feels dry all year long. The dryness might get worse depending on the climate, season, or activity, but regardless of those things, without great skin care products, the uncomfortable dry, tight feeling will persist.
As mentioned above, dehydrated skin can look and feel similar, but there’s a major difference: Dehydrated skin tends to come and go, it does not persist.

With that, let’s take a look at a few of the best humectant serums for keeping skin optimally hydrated day after day…

Kosmetic Immunity | Beta Glucan Recovery Serum

I’ve been hearing more and more about Beta Glucan recently so I was naturally intrigued by an entire brand whose formulas are all infused with high levels of the irritation-soothing humectant. Yes, every Kosmetic Immunity (formerly known as JKosmmume) formula is based on Beta Glucan, including the brand’s signature Beta Glucan Recovery Serum, which contains a purported 97% concentration of mBeta Glucan. (More on that concentration below.)

My skincare muse Paula Begoun gives Beta Glucan her top rating as one of the best ingredients for the skin. Beta Glucan is defined as a “polysaccharide sugar derived from yeast or oats. It has some antioxidant properties and is a skin-soothing agent. Beta-glucan is considered an excellent ingredient for improving the look of redness and other signs of sensitive skin.”

If you’re curious like I was to compare it to tried-and-true Hyaluronic Acid, Beta Glucan has been proven to be 20% more hydrating than HA. Intrigued yet?

So I’m naturally intrigued by the Kosmetic Immunity Beta Glucan Recovery Serum — and have gone through about a half dozen bottles of it since I first discovered the deliciously silky treatment in 2018.

It’s a silky smooth serum that’s not very watery, but not very pulpy either — unlike the vast majority of HA serums. It’s always one or the other depending on the size of the HA molecules in the formula.

What is Beta Glucan?

I found an excellent article on the Byrdie website titled, Introducing Beta Glucan, A Little-Known Skincare Ingredient With Big Potential. In it…

“Better than hyaluronic acid” is a bold claim to make when speaking to any beauty editor, much less one at Byrdie. We take our hyaluronic acid—and all of our other hydrators—very seriously. So when we're pitched an ingredient like beta-glucans, which have been the subject of some seemingly far-flung claims, we do our research. And honestly, we're pleased with what we found. But beta-glucans don't occur naturally in the human body—so why would we need them? And what exactly are they? We spoke to Dr. Dendy Engelman; Dr. Michelle Wong, Science Educator and Content Creator behind LabMuffin; and Alicia Zalka, M.D. and Founder of Surface Deep to get the scoop.
What is Beta Glucan?
According to Dendy Engelman, "Beta-glucans, written as β-glucans, are polysaccharides (multiple sugars, starch, cellulose bonded together) found in yeast, bacteria, fungi, seaweed, and grains like oats." So you can ingest them in food, or they can be extracted and applied to your skin. It feels like we all take so many pills (and it's a lot to keep track of,) so we don't blame you if you're more invested in the effects of the latter.
“Beta glucan is a humectant moisturiser that attracts water to the top layers of skin,"“ Wong says. Accounts on the internet from people claiming that when used topically the ingredient boosted their hydration levels and skin barrier function were easy to find, drawing us in even further. An ingredient that does all that while decreasing the look of wrinkles, redness, and irritation seems almost too good to be true—or at least like it would be used in skincare more often if it were.

Kosmetic Immunity’s 99% pure, all-natural serum is a tight formulation, comprising just seven ingredients in all: Water, Glycerin, 1,2-Hexanediol, Beta Glucan, Portulaca Oleracea Extract, Centella Asiatica Extract and Butylene Glycol. While I love the simplicity of the INCI, it doesn’t make much sense that the formula is composed of a 97% concentration of mBeta Glucan given that there are there ingredients with higher concentrations. Umm, okay then.

No matter, it’s quite an effective treatment and a perfectly acceptable alternative to Hyaluronic Acid with the added irritation soothing benefits of both the Beta Glucan and Centella Asiatica Extract. It’s clean, it’s simple and it’s effective. What more could I ask for? Except more Beta Glucan products in my life…

SHOP THE BLOG: Purchase the Kosmetic Immunity Beta Glucan Recovery Serum for $52 here.

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