How This Bioactive Peptide Targets Menopausal Skin Aging
By Lisa Collins | Fact Checked | Sources
Menopause isn't just hot flashes, mood swings, and fatigue. It's a whole-body transition that's closely tied to aging. During this transition, estrogen levels fluctuate and drop quickly, and with them come changes to your muscle mass, sleep patterns, memory, and, importantly, skin. One study even finds that menopause can accelerate aging by up to 9 years in just 6 months due to a sudden collapse in estrogen levels.
One of the first places estrogen loss shows up is in the skin. Women often find that skin conditions like dryness and crepey skin accelerate during this time. Because these aren’t just surface-level issues, you need more than surface-level solutions.
That’s where OS-01 comes in. This bioactive peptide, developed by OneSkin, was designed to address the root causes of skin aging. It works by targeting cellular damage and supporting key functions, allowing your skin to continue functioning as it should, even as estrogen levels decline.
How Does Skin Age During Menopause?
While often associated with female sex organs, men also produce small amounts of the hormone to support various aspects of their biology. Yet what sets estrogen's role in female health apart is the sheer density of estrogen receptors found across a woman's body. Estrogen plays a crucial role in coordinating many important bodily functions, including maintaining bone density, regulating hair growth, and producing collagen within skin cells.
As you go through menopause, the levels of estrogen available to perform these functions drop significantly. This leads to several changes in skin function as it struggles to perform basic maintenance tasks, like collagen repair.
Here’s what’s happening underneath the surface:
Increased Fine Lines And Wrinkles
Estrogen stimulates collagen synthesis by binding to estrogen receptors in fibroblasts, the cells that produce and maintain the extracellular matrix, a network of proteins between skin cells. These receptors regulate the production of these nets of collagen and other essential proteins, which give your skin its strength and elasticity.
The depletion of estrogen during menopause initiates a rapid loss of collagen in skin, up to 30% in the five years after menopause. This is followed by a steady annual decline of 2%. Estrogen also inhibits a group of collagen-remodeling enzymes called matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs). This dual effect accelerates the loss of structural proteins in the skin, leading to compromised skin integrity.
As a result, the skin loses density and elasticity, causing fine lines to become more permanent as the collagen scaffolding deteriorates. This effect is particularly prominent in areas that move frequently, such as the skin around the eyes or mouth. When combined with the shrinking of muscle and fat deposits under the facial skin, these effects can be even more pronounced.
Decreased Skin Hydration
One of the first changes in menopausal skin is its reduced ability to retain moisture. As collagen levels decline, the skin thins by a little more than 1% every year post menopause. What's more impactful, however, is the loss of moisturizing skin oils, known as sebum. This is because estrogen is a critical regulator of this epidermal lipid production, which is essential for maintaining skin hydration and barrier integrity. Without them, the barrier thins, water escapes more easily, and dryness becomes a persistent issue.
But dryness isn’t just uncomfortable, it's a signal that the skin’s defenses are weakening. A compromised barrier opens the door to irritation and inflammation, which can affect more than just your skin. Skin with a weakened barrier has been shown to contribute to elevated circulating levels of low-grade systemic inflammation, which accelerates aging through a process known as inflammaging.
Increased Hormonal Acne
While menopause marks a clear hormonal decline, the biological changes that impact skin often begin much earlier, during perimenopause. While perimenopause is associated with overall reductions in estrogen, the real culprit behind hormonal acne during this time is the rapid fluctuations in hormone levels.
As the ratio of estrogen to androgens, such as testosterone, changes, the skin's ability to regulate sebum production is inhibited. This contributes to clogged pores and creates an ideal environment for acne-causing bacteria to thrive.
These breakouts tend to be different from teenage acne that occurs during puberty. They tend to be deeper and more painful cysts that appear around the chin and jawline. Because the cause is hormonal and skin regeneration slows with age, these breakouts can be more challenging to treat and take longer to heal.
Increased Skin Sensitivity And Reactivity
Menopausal skin isn't just thinner and drier; it's more reactive to potential irritants. This is because the barrier that once protected against everyday irritants weakens, making the skin more reactive to things like perfumes, fabrics, and even products that have been well tolerated for years. For those with a history of sensitive skin, these disruptions can reignite dormant eczema symptoms. At the same time, changes in skin pH triggered by changing estrogen levels can disrupt the balance of healthy bacteria on the skin, further weakening its defenses.
Uneven Skin Tone And Pigmentation Irregularities
Melanogenesis, the process by which your body produces the pigments in skin, is tightly regulated by hormonal signaling. During most of a woman's life, estrogen controls the production of these pigments but isn't overexpressed. During the menopausal transition, however, rapidly fluctuating estrogen levels can lead to overstimulated melanocytes that produce sporadic dark spots. This process is similar to the melasma that occurs during pregnancy, when estrogen levels increase significantly.
These changes can feel sudden or unpredictable, especially in areas frequently exposed to sunlight. As the skin’s natural repair systems weaken and aging-related processes accelerate, damage from sun exposure is more likely to result in persistent discoloration in perimenopausal and postmenopausal skin.
What is the OS-01 Peptide?
These skin changes are not just due to a shift in hormones; they're intrinsically tied to the biological process of aging. Unfortunately, most products that claim to treat skin aging primarily address symptoms, such as loss of hydration, rather than the underlying causes.
That’s why OneSkin developed OS-01, the first senotherapeutic peptide specifically formulated to address a key root mechanism of skin aging. After discovering that most skin care actives promising “anti-aging” effects have no effect, or even accelerate skin aging, OneSkin spent over five years screening more than 900 peptides for their effects on biological age. This led them to develop OS-01, which possesses unique abilities to reduce the senescent burden in skin cells. It achieves this by facilitating cellular repair within pre-senescent cells, thereby preventing them from progressing to a fully senescent state.
Unlike collagen creams that often can’t penetrate deeply or supplements that rely on systemic uptake, OS-01 is a small, bioactive peptide optimized to work at the cellular level to help stimulate your cells’ production of collagen, which time and estrogen loss break down.
What is Cellular Senescence?
Senescent cells are damaged or aged cells that stop functioning properly but don’t die off like they should. These cells' natural response to this stimulus is to release a blend of inflammatory markers and MMPs called senescence-associated secretory phenotype (SASP) that signal to your immune system to come and clear this cell away.
The problem? As we age, the immune system weakens, and these “zombie cells” begin to accumulate. Furthermore, these cells can spread their dysfunction to nearby cells through the chronic inflammation caused by SASP.
This buildup plays a significant role in skin aging, contributing to wrinkles, discoloration, and chronic low-grade inflammation. Skin aging, particularly that which occurs during the menopausal transition, can have significant and long-lasting effects on overall health.
Why OS-01 Is Especially Relevant for Midlife Skin
Senescence is a relevant aspect of the aging factors experienced during menopause, due to estrogen's role in regulating both inflammatory responses and cellular senescence. Although the exact change in senescence before and after menopause is challenging to study due to each woman's unique hormonal balance, menopause is believed to accelerate the accumulation of these cells.
OS-01 plays a role in reducing these senescent cells, thereby helping to mitigate the cellular changes responsible for the visible signs of skin aging associated with menopause.
OS-01 Reduces The Senescent Burden On Skin Cells
Measuring the effects of the OS-01 peptide on senescent cells is relatively straightforward. After treating ex vivo skin models with the OS-01 peptide, researchers at OneSkin used a chemical that selectively stains senescent cells blue, called β-galactosidase. Then it's as simple as counting the number of blue cells before and after treatment.
When tested in this manner, their researchers found that the OS-01 peptide reduced senescent cells by up to 50%, surpassing the effects of any of the other 900+ peptides they screened.
Here's a closer look at some of the products that you can find the OS-01 peptide in and what they can do for menopausal skin:
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OS-01 BODY Improves Skin Barrier Function: During their recently published clinical study, OneSkin’s OS-01 BODY topical supplement significantly improved skin barrier function in participants. While these results are impressive (+41.49% on forearm skin and +34.73% on upper arm skin), it's the effect OS-01 BODY had on the rest of the body that was so groundbreaking. After only 12 weeks of use, participants saw a significant reduction in circulating levels of an inflammatory biomarker, suggesting that these improvements to skin barrier function may have a systemic effect on low-grade chronic inflammation triggered by aging skin.
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OS-01 EYE Improves Skin Hydration: OS-01 EYE contains the highest concentration of the OS-01 peptide of any OneSkin product. Their clinical results demonstrate the effectiveness of this additional peptide in reducing the signs of skin aging. Participants saw a significant improvement in skin hydration of +32.49%. For menopausal skin that struggles to retain its moisture, especially in areas prone to signs of skin aging, such as the eye, this product is a game-changer.
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OS-01 Can Help Reduce the Appearance of Hyperpigmentation: By targeting the root causes of aging skin, such as senescence, OS-01 FACE is designed to reverse the visible effects of aged skin. However, this isn't limited to restoring skin barrier function or hydration. During a consumer perception study on the effects of OS-01 FACE on reducing hyperpigmentation and dark spots, around 68% of participants using OS-01 FACE experienced a reduction in their dark spots after only 6 weeks. This is due to the role that aging processes, such as senescence and oxidation, play in accelerating hyperpigmentation.
Bottom Line
Your skin's needs are constantly fluctuating during the menopausal transition. However, with the right products, like OneSkin’s scientifically validated formulations, you can stay ahead of your skin's needs with safe, non-comedogenic products designed by longevity scientists to target the root causes of skin aging.
Take the first step toward healthier, more youthful skin during menopause with OneSkin’s OS-01 products, and enjoy 15% off your first purchase using code MORPHUS at checkout.
