Just when I thought I had caught up on peptides and salmon sperm, beauty gave me exosomes.
And exosomes sound particularly impressive.
Cellular communication. Regeneration. Advanced biotechnology. Tiny messengers delivering information between cells.
At some point, I started wondering whether I was shopping for skincare or funding a research lab.
But here’s the thing: exosomes are real science.
They’re being seriously studied in fields including regenerative medicine, cancer biology and immunology. What’s considerably less established is whether putting them into a skincare product and applying that product to intact skin delivers the benefits some of the marketing would have you believe.
Those are two very different questions.
So, once again, I went down the rabbit hole.
First, What Exactly Is an Exosome?
Exosomes are tiny structures released by cells.
They’re generally described as extracellular vesicles—essentially microscopic packages that can carry things like proteins, lipids and genetic material between cells.
In the body, they’re involved in cell-to-cell communication.
Which is fascinating.
It’s also easy to see how we got from that scientific fact to the skincare pitch:
If exosomes help cells communicate inside the body, maybe putting them on the skin can encourage all sorts of wonderful things to happen there too.
Maybe.
That last step is where the science gets considerably less settled.
How Did Exosomes Suddenly End Up in Skincare?
Exosomes started getting much more attention in aesthetics and consumer skincare around 2022.
They showed up in professional treatments, serums, ampoules, post-procedure products and eventually very expensive little bottles promising everything from rejuvenation to regeneration.
And the story is almost irresistible.
This isn’t another botanical extract with a nice origin story. This is cellular communication.
It sounds advanced because it is advanced.
The problem is that the marketing moved considerably faster than the independent clinical research on topical cosmetic use.
And we’ve seen this movie before.
An ingredient can be incredibly interesting scientifically without every claim attached to a consumer product containing it being proven.
And Then There’s the FDA
This is where things get a little confusing, because you’ll sometimes see the FDA warnings about exosomes used as evidence that exosome skincare itself is somehow prohibited.
That’s not quite what the source material says.
The FDA has issued consumer warnings regarding unapproved exosome products marketed for medical and therapeutic purposes. According to the FDA position described in the research for this article, there are no FDA-approved exosome products for treating diseases or medical conditions.
That’s important.
But cosmetics and drugs are regulated differently.
A topical cosmetic product isn’t automatically the same thing as an unapproved exosome therapy. The issue becomes much more serious when a product starts making medical claims about treating, healing or altering disease.
So I wouldn’t look at an exosome serum and immediately think, The FDA says this is dangerous.
I would think:
What exactly is this product claiming to do—and where is the evidence that it does it?
The Part I Couldn’t Get Past: How Does It Get There?
Our skin is annoyingly good at doing its job.
And one of its biggest jobs is keeping things out.
Exosomes are biological structures generally described as roughly 30 to 150 nanometers in size. The outermost layer of our skin—the stratum corneum—is specifically designed to act as a barrier.
Which creates a fairly important question for topical exosome skincare:
Do intact, biologically active exosomes actually get through that barrier in meaningful amounts?
Based on the research summarized for this article, we don’t have enough independent evidence yet to answer that confidently.
There is interesting research involving exosomes in clinical settings, wound healing and other medical applications.
But taking results from those settings and assuming the same thing happens when you smooth a serum onto intact skin is a leap.
And I don’t particularly like paying premium skincare prices for leaps.
Then There’s the Jar Problem
Let’s say we solve the penetration question.
There’s another one.
Exosomes are biological structures. They have to be produced, processed, formulated, packaged, shipped, stored and then sit in your bathroom until you finally get to the bottom of the bottle.
Potentially for months.
So are those exosomes still intact and biologically active when you’re actually putting the product on your face?
That’s a pretty important detail.
And according to the research summarized for this article, long-term stability in everyday shelf-stable cosmetic formulations isn’t yet something the independent literature has established with the confidence I’d want given some of the claims being made.
Again, that doesn’t mean exosomes don’t work.
It means there are still some very reasonable questions.
So Are Exosomes Just Hype?
I wouldn’t go that far either.
This is what makes these newer skincare ingredients so interesting—and so difficult to write about without falling into one camp or the other.
Exosomes themselves are real.
The biology is real.
The medical research is real and developing.
There may eventually be fascinating applications for them in dermatology and aesthetics.
What we don’t have yet is the same depth of independent evidence showing that exosomes sitting inside a shelf-stable cosmetic product, applied topically to intact skin, reliably produce all the benefits currently being marketed.
Those two statements can exist at the same time.
Beauty marketing isn’t always great at nuance.
Unfortunately, science usually requires it.
Which Brought Us Back to the Boring Stuff
And by “boring,” I mean ingredients we’ve been studying for decades.
Vitamin C.
Vitamin E.
Astaxanthin.
Fucoxanthin.
Barrier-supporting lipids.
They’re not going to give you quite the same futuristic story as cellular messengers.
But when we were developing Apposé Lip TX, that wasn’t really the assignment.
We weren’t looking for the ingredient with the best story.
We were looking for ingredients with enough established research behind them that we understood why they were in the formula.
And sometimes that means choosing the ingredient everyone already knows over the one everyone suddenly wants to talk about.
Why Apposé Lip TX Doesn’t Contain Exosomes
For the same reason we didn’t add PDRN or peptides simply because they’re getting attention.
We didn’t think they needed to be there.
Lip TX was built around an antioxidant and barrier-supporting approach using ingredients including astaxanthin, fucoxanthin, stable oil-soluble vitamin C, tocopherol and skin-identical lipids.
Could exosome research eventually become compelling enough that I look at the category differently?
Of course.
I hope it does. That’s the fun part of science.
But I don’t think being first to put the newest ingredient on the front of a box is necessarily the same thing as making the better product.
Sometimes I’d rather let the science catch up first.
Apposé Lip TX. Arrive Ready.
A Few Questions I Had Too
Are exosome skincare products safe?
Based on the source material for this article, the biggest questions surrounding cosmetic exosome products involve things like sourcing, stability and the amount of independent evidence behind their claims.
That’s different from exosome products marketed as medical therapies, where the FDA has specifically warned consumers about unapproved products.
The word “exosome” alone doesn’t tell you enough. How it’s sourced, formulated, used and marketed matters.
Does the FDA approve exosome skincare?
Cosmetics aren’t FDA-approved in the same way drugs are.
The FDA warnings discussed here concern unapproved exosome products being marketed for medical or therapeutic uses.
That’s an important distinction because saying “the FDA has warned about exosomes” without explaining the context makes the situation sound considerably simpler than it actually is.
Do topical exosomes actually penetrate the skin?
That’s one of the big unanswered questions.
According to the research summarized for this article, there isn’t yet a strong body of independent, peer-reviewed evidence establishing that intact, biologically active exosomes in a topical cosmetic reliably penetrate the skin barrier to the depth necessary to accomplish all of the signaling effects being marketed.
Promising isn’t the same as proven.
Would I use an exosome skincare product?
I’m not opposed to it.
I’m just not convinced I need one yet.
If the research develops and we eventually have good independent clinical evidence showing meaningful benefits from properly formulated topical exosomes, I’ll happily reconsider.
Until then, I’m perfectly comfortable being late to this particular trend.
Fashionably late, you might say.
Sources
consumer alert on regenerative medicine products including exosomes https://www.fda.gov/vaccines-blood-biologics/consumers-biologics/consumer-alert-regenerative-medicine-products-including-stem-cells-and-exosomes
the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology https://www.jaad.org/
the Apposé Lip TX product page https://shopappose.com/products/appose-liptx