Your skin doesn't stay healthy because of a few special molecules. It relies on thousands of them. Peptides, proteins, fats, sugars and molecular signals… all working together. We harvest all of them from thriving cells that came from one Pacific salmon years ago.

That's MCC: the complete environment cells actually live in, not just a few individual ingredients. Most “actives” are one purified compound; MCC is the whole recipe.

Explore the scientific wonder of this complex below.

Collagen is the protein that keeps skin firm and plump (the protein structure just beneath the surface). Your cells make less of it every year, which is how fine lines and sagging begin.

In lab tests on human skin cells, MCC flipped the switch on collagen production: up to 4× more Type I collagen than untreated cells, and about 6× more than retinol (the gold standard for anti-aging bioactives) without retinol's familiar irritation.

If collagen is the structure, elastin is the spring: the protein that lets skin snap back after a smile or a pinch.

It's notoriously hard to stimulate our cells to make more of it, and most ingredients (retinol included) barely move it.

MCC raised elastin production up to 9× compared with untreated skin cells.

A lot of visible aging and redness is driven by low-grade inflammation, sometimes called “inflammaging.”

We measured three of the skin's main inflammation signals and compared MCC against salmon PDRN. MCC quieted all three even further, cutting IL-6 (a key inflammatory messenger) by 83% versus 25% for PDRN.

To test repair, we grow a sheet of skin cells, make a clean scratch through it, and watch how quickly the cells crawl in to close the gap (a gold standard test for wound healing).

After 32 hours, the gap treated with MCC had far more cells move in than untreated skin or either form of PDRN: roughly 2× more than PDRN, and about 5× more than no treatment.

Healthy, living cells are the foundation of glowing skin. As we age, more of them slow down or die off. In an independent lab test, adding MCC increased the number of living, healthy skin cells by up to 23% versus untreated cells. We think of “untreated” as plain water as the base of most cosmetics. It's clear that the more MCC is added, the better.

Exosomes are tiny bubbles (far smaller than a cell) that cells use to send messages and cargo to one another. Think of them as nature's delivery trucks: they wrap up growth factors and instructions, protect them, and carry them where they need to go. That delivery system is a big reason MCC's signals actually reach your skin, and MCC is naturally packed with them.

You can find out what specific peptides and proteins are found in MCC exosomes by asking the MCC Explorer below.

We sent MCC to an independent lab and used mass spectrometry to catalog what's inside.

The count so far: 15,540 different peptides and 5,105 different proteins, in addition to marine collagen, antioxidants and salmon PDRN. A few of the standouts are listed below:

Below are representative results using MCC:

Further clinical studies are currently underway; results will be published as they become available.

MCC science is unique because it's still evolving. We're learning more about MCC each day, with the help of our community of scientists, physicians, formulation experts, brands, and most importantly, our fans! We're always looking for new things to study within its vast complexity; try our MCC Explorer below to make your own AI-assisted discoveries within our vast scientific datasets.

If you're interested in a topic that isn't described here, please reach out. We're always grateful for our community's scientific ideas and curiosity.