Twenty years ago, skin creams were extracts and vitamins. Melon, pressed berries, things in their natural form. There was real science behind it, but the formulas didn't do what the infomercials said, and a lot of people tuned out of the whole conversation. Totally reasonable.

What changed is peptides. Tiny proteins, made in labs from clean ingredients. Different peptides do different jobs. One is the ingredient for firmness. One is the ingredient for softness. Another helps soften the look of expression lines, gently.

It's the mix that people notice, and the reason most creams only carry one of the three is cost, and the fact that one is enough to put a claim on the front of the box.

Here are the three, with their names, so you can look them up.

Firmness is a collagen story. Collagen is the scaffolding the look of firmness depends on, and the ingredient we use for it is Trylagen, a complex of peptides and proteins designed around collagen, developed in Barcelona. It's in the jar to support a denser, bouncier look as skin renews on its own schedule.

Softness is the odd one out, because the ingredient that does it best in our jar isn't a peptide at all. It's Pentavitin, saccharide isomerate on the label, a plant-derived sugar with an unusual talent: it binds to keratin, the protein your skin's surface is made of, and holds moisture exactly there. That's what softness that lasts through the day feels like, as opposed to softness that lasts until the cream has evaporated.

Smoothness, specifically the look of expression lines, is Argireline, acetyl hexapeptide-8, a pharmaceutical-grade peptide from Barcelona and one of the most studied cosmetic peptides of the last twenty years. It's applied where the face folds, the forehead and the space between the brows, to soften how those lines look.

A peptide, if you're wondering, is a short chain of amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. Peptides are made in labs from clean ingredients, and because they're small they can work at the surface layers where the look of skin is decided.

The reason the mix matters is that skin doesn't age one job at a time. It gets a little less firm, a little less soft and a little more lined together, so a cream that addresses one of the three tends to look like it did nothing, because the other two are still moving. Day & Night Ageless carries all three, plus Lipogard (coenzyme Q10 with vitamin E) and GluCare (a beta-glucan, the soother), and every one of them is named on the jar.

If you want to test the idea rather than take my word for it, use the cream on one side of your face and neck, morning and night, for two weeks, and judge the two sides in the mirror. That's how most of our customers decided.

-Jackie