The preparation of skin analogue composition having the liquid crystalline structure and its cosmetic applications

Recently, many cosmetic researchers have been focused on the development of high functional cosmetics including anti-wrinkle and whitening. In these studies, they couldn't afford to pay a deep attention to stable encapsulations for unstable materials and efficient drug deliveries for them. Particularly, in order to show a degree of instant effects as cosmetics, they can't also ignore moisturizing effect enough to satisfy customers just after applying and its maintenance by improving the function of skin barrier as well as above two effects. Therefore, skin analogue systems have attracted considerable attention in the view of structural and compositional similarity to intercellular membrane in stratum corneum. And, some models for skin analogue composition were developed to improve the function of skin barrier, stably encapsulate unstable materials such as retinol, vitamin B, C, E, etc., and control their skin penetration in order to show good effects as cosmetics. In this study, we suggest the new skin analogue model having the compositional similarity as well as conventional structural ones. Our skin analogue membrane(SAM) is mainly composed of ceramide/ cholesterol/phosphatidylcholin/fatty acids and its structural defects are compensated by including cholesterol amphiphile and controlling the ratio of ceramide/cholesterol. It was possible to confirm the formation of skin analogue membrane having highly-densed multilamella structure and compare them according to the change of each ratio with a polarized microscope, X-ray diffraction. More detaily, we observed their structures with a electron microscope(TEM). Finally, we dispersed them in excess of continuous water phase, observed the formation of maltese-cross liquid crystalline and measured the efficiency of drug deliveries and moisturizing effects.