Your car (your pride and joy) is all out of petrol. It whimpers to a halt on the side of a dusty road. You find a canister in the boot and, hoping for the best, fill the tank. It’s the wrong oil, your car shunts along, cantankerously, but further down the road, it coughs and splurts and again, slowing down to a bumpy stop.

This, friends, is exactly how your skin works – except exchange the petrol for a molecule called AGP,  or in layman’s terms, skin energy. The cells hidden deep within the dermis work like little engines - feed them the right stuff and they’ll do right by you – feed them garbage and they’ll respond with laziness, malaise and bad behaviour. 

And that’s exactly the thinking behind one of Olay’s biggest innovations to date, a reformulation of its wildly successful Regenerist range, which is targeted at mid 30-somethings and upwards. At the heart of this innovation, is the principle that for a cell to do its job effectively, it requires good and consistent amounts of energy, just like our bodies. Still, the need for skin energy in itself isn’t a particularly new strand to skin science – we’ve known this for a while. But, what hasn’t been clear up until now is how we can affect that skin energy; tinker with it, feed it and measure how it deals with different environments. 

"the energy that’s filtered through to the skin, begins to drop off a cliff from your 30s onwards"

‘Only in the last few years have we seen machines and devices that are able to measure the energy in living cells,’ explaines Dr Frauke Neuser, Principal Scientist for Olay. ‘Ten years ago, we were only able to measure the end result, now you can look inside living cells as they breathe and make new energy without having to disturb them.’ 

Of course, our bodies naturally create biological energy which we use in every head tilt, pivot, fantastical thought, or belly laugh, but the crucial thing to remember is that – rather depressingly – the leftover energy that’s filtered through to the skin once all the important organs have had their lot, begins to drop off a cliff from your 30s onwards. You know, just as we’re starting to afford ourselves lovely dresses and shoes, our skin starts to go south.  When this sort of chronological ageing happens, it cause skin fatigue, which is manifested in several ways, not least a failure to metabolise and deal with any ingredients that manage to journey down through to the cells, rendering all those expensive potions and serums pretty useless. 

The trick is, reversing the onslaught of skin fatigue, so that the cells might efficiently digest the key ingredients on a daily basis. Enter the game-changing new blend from Olay Regenerist, a new formula which comes packed to the rafters with Niacinimide  - a powerful ingredient known for its propensity to welcome ingredients into skin cells so that they might do their jobs efficiently. ‘It’s fuel for the cell, the more you put in, the better the effect,’ adds Dr Neuser. And so, in theory, the new formula could also boost the absorption of your other skincare products. ‘It’s not necessarily something we looked into clinically, but from what’s we’ve seen, it can enhance the effect of your other products too.’ 

"We used to believe that the decline in energy was the result of ageing but, now we think it’s the cause of ageing itself" - Dr Frauke Neuser

Sidled up against the powerhouse that is Niacinimide, comes an Amino-Peptide Complex which locks in moisture, thereby reducing the appearance of fine lines and alongside that , OliveM, a derivative of Olive Oil tailored by Olay, which helps to shuttle the remaining ingredients to the cells, for a far smoother ride. 

All this has brought about a pretty poignant shift in the understanding of skin ageing. ‘We used to believe that the decline in energy was the result of ageing,’ explains Dr Neuser. ‘But, now we think it’s the cause of ageing itself and so that understanding totally changes the way you design your products.’ Indeed, Olay have been quick to bounce on the new findings, interestingly not with an entirely new range of anti-ageing serums and creams, but by updating, improving and enhancing its current Olay Regenerist family. 

‘We came across some of the ingredients we were already using in Regenerist, so we were already in a good place which we could make better – rather than starting from scratch.’ And the result? Well, healthier, better-looking skin. ‘Just fixing the skin energy has an effect on the signs of ageing but also on skin tone and pigmentation, that we didn’t expect, so we created Regenerist Luminous too’ adds Dr Neuser. A genuine skin boost for less than a pair of shoes? That’s something this 30 year-old can get behind. 

Olay Regenerist - upgraded - and Regenerist Luminous are available now at Boots, from £19.99