ELC is investing in technology to fight sugar’s impact on skin
ELC is investing in technology to fight sugar’s impact on skin
Publish Date: 2026-04-27 00:58:00
Source Domain: www.glossy.co
The Estée Lauder Companies’ research team has been busy proving a new connection between everyday sugar consumption and skin aging. Now, this discovery is set to impact the conglomerate’s new product pipeline and marketing initiatives on existing products.
“[We discovered] major cellular impact, right on the skin cells [after less than two weeks of sugar exposure],” Claude Saliou, Estée Lauder Companies SVP of advanced technologies, global clinical and consumer sciences, told Glossy. “It was quite surprising to see, actually, how profound and quick those changes were happening.”
Published last week in the “International Journal of Molecular Sciences,” ELC’s newest peer-reviewed study documents a new connection between cellular exposure to fructose, an everyday sugar common in most American diets, and the body’s internal responses that age the skin, like inflammation, slowed cellular repair and the development of senescent cells, known among savvy skin-care shoppers as “zombie cells.”
Researchers have long understood that excess sugar in the bloodstream can bind to collagen, creating a stiffening effect on the skin, Saliou said. “But what was not as clearly established is how the skin cells are behaving under this type of stress,” he said. “We’re actually really surprised to see how it has quite a profound impact on skin-cell behavior.”
Saliou has spent 25 years in personal care-focused research and development, including 13 years at Johnson & Johnson followed by the last 12 at ELC.
The in vitro study was written by six in-house ELC researchers and found “high fructose levels affect many critical skin functions that contribute to the aging process and recapitulate several aspects of aging related to AGE [advanced glycation end products].”
The body becomes less and less sophisticated at processing and disposing of excess sugar in the blood as we age, Saliou told Glossy. As we know, elevated blood…
