Chiral Technology

If you want to visualize what Chiral means, the best place to start is to look at your hands. Your hands are basically mirror-images of each other. They are Chiral. The importance of this becomes more apparent if you decided to wear your left glove on your right hands. Since yours hands are not super imposable on one another, the left glove will not fit the right hand and vice versa.

Your right hand properly fills the right glove in the same way that a right-handed molecule fills a designated need in your body in a way that the left-handed molecule cannot. All of Mother Nature's life-building molecules were (and still are) created in pairs with their mirror-images.

The sugars and carbohydrates in your body are right-handed. They have a specific purpose that left-handed sugars do not have in your body. Therefore, our body only needs right-handed sugars.

The amino acids in your body are left-handed. You will not find a protein in the body that contains right-handed amino acids. Your body provides the correct glove - i.e. function - for every molecule from which the body is constructed. These gloves are called receptors. All receptors are Chiral.

The word "Chiral" is from the Greek word 'kheir," which means "hand." The key point about Chirality is that nature and the body are naturally Chiral; however, industry is unable to meet the demands for natural ingredients - at least through the process of wringing them from their natural source.

Through the brilliance of chemistry, ingredients can be synthesized to mirror the natural molecule, in almost every way, except one. Synthesized molecules create both a left-and a right-hand together in the same molecule; this is called a racemic molecule. The two hands must be split apart so that the appropriate hand can fit the appropriate receptor in the body. Once the split takes place, the molecule is natural again.

The scientific process of splitting a molecule is called Chiral Separation. Due to the complicated and expensive nature of Chiral Separation, the pharmaceutical industry, for example, has avoided using the process in the manufacturing of ingested drugs until just the last 15 years or so. We have all witnessed the side effects (such as the birth defects of Thalidomide 40 years ago) caused by forcing non-Chiral drugs into Chiral bodies. However, drug manufacturers are finally starting to separate these two-sided molecules so that only the "good" side reaches the body. They are even going back and re-doing old drugs into Chiral forms to ensure greater effectiveness and safety.

Why is Chirality important in skin care? Take a well-known ingredient such as Vitamin E. Vitamin E has three possible forms: the "D" form (right handed), the "L" form (left handed) and the racemic form (both D & L). Your body only utilizes D-alpha-tocopherol. The L-alpha tocopherol seems functionless, and the DL (racemic) form can cause allergic reactions. Chrially-Correct simply means we use the "D" form while eliminating the functionless "L" form and the potential allergic reaction caused by the "DL" form. There are many other ingredients used in skin care products which would be similar to the above example.

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