The ageing of skin: A 3D in vitro approach by L’OREAL
28 August 2015
Human skin is a complex, multi-functional organ forming a protective envelope for the body against stress from the external environment. Due to this unique situation, its ageing is the result both of factors considered as intrinsic, such as chronological ageing, and extrinsic factors: essentially exposure to sunlight, which causes photoageing.
Study of this complex phenomenon in volunteers may be open to debate and conventional culturing of cells is not sufficiently similar to physiological conditions in the living body, but the reconstructed skin technology developed over the last twenty years by L’Oréal therefore offers a means of overcoming these limitations. This is so because it is possible to reproduce in the laboratory the three-dimensional architecture of the skin by reconstructing its dermal and epidermal compartments.