There are few ingredients more widely used in skin clinics than hyaluronic acid, particularly when used in hybrid treatments such as HAmonyCa.
One of the core components of dermal fillers, hyaluronic acid is key to the structure of your skin, collects a lot of water and is vital to ensuring your skin looks plump and healthy. The reason why skin sagging and wrinkles are more common as people age is due to lower amounts of hyaluronic acid.
Because of this, products with hyaluronic acid have become a key part of so many skin routines, not just as an addition to conventional skincare products but also as part of a wide range of injectable treatments.
What makes this so interesting is that like so many skincare essentials, hyaluronic acid was not initially used for plumper, smoother skin. In fact, it was not used for skincare at all.
Eye Of The Beholder
Hyaluronic acid was first discovered as a compound in 1934 by Karl Meyer (1899 – 1990).
Known at the time as hyaluronan, his initial discoveries of natural hyaluronic acid from the eye of a cow were somewhat tempered by its short half-life. This made it less useful than it could have been initially.
However, the eye proved to be where hyaluronic acid’s initial benefits lay, as it would help to fix one of the biggest problems with increasingly complex surgical procedures on the eye during this period.
One major treatment that was starting to become popular in the 1970s was the implantation of intraocular lenses. Intraocular implants were clear lenses that were implanted in the eye as a replacement for the cloudy natural lens that was the result of cataract surgery.
The surgery was first successfully completed by Sir Harold Ridley in 1949, but it took over three decades to gain widespread acceptance, and part of that process was thanks to hyaluronic acid.
Several developments were needed in surgical techniques and lens design, but a fundamental problem was that an implantation procedure would quickly lead to fluid building in the cornea, which turned out to be caused by the lens scratching against the cornea and causing damage to endothelial cells.
This scraping needed to stop, and this required a clear lubricant that was thick and would be accepted by the body.
The answer turned out to be hyaluronic acid and after Healon was developed in the late 1970s, it would quickly start to be used for not only IOL implants but also the transplantation of the cornea, surgery to fix a detached retina, surgery for glaucoma and also for cataracts more broadly.
This increased throughout the 1980s and 1990s, with the only reduction in its use for eye surgery coming due to the rise in popularity of laser eye corrective treatments.
However, by the 1990s, hyaluronic acid had started to become widely used in the completely different fields of skincare and cosmetic clinics.
It has also seen use in the repair of facial clefts and treating lipodystrophy, particularly the type caused by active antiretroviral treatments.