Chapter 94

Six months does not produce nothing. There were a dozen-odd documents on anti-ageing ingredients on the stick, and a good deal of value in them, and what caught her attention most was resveratrol.

Resveratrol is a natural antioxidant whose various biological activities not only slow ageing effectively but strengthen the skin's natural defences, giving skin cells six times the protection, helping them resist environmental damage, and giving damaged cells a longer window in which to repair themselves.

Effects that good had naturally caught Zhang Lin's team's attention, and the resveratrol material was the largest part of the stick. And had it no drawbacks they'd have started on it long ago. Against the advantages, the problems are equally plain — first, the source. Resveratrol occurs mainly in common medicinal plants such as giant knotweed, cassia and mulberry, and in crops like grapes and peanuts. At present the principal sources of natural resveratrol are knotweed and grapes.

Knotweed grows concentrated in Hunan and Sichuan, where annual harvests have already saturated, and research into cultivating it is only beginning; between technique, the supply of wild material and the cost of cultivation, it hasn't been planted at scale. Which means natural wild resveratrol is currently scarce, and enormously short of market demand.

Second, quality. Knotweed is one of the main sources, and resveratrol extracted from it, above the level the body tolerates, readily produces adverse reactions, in pregnant women especially — and its character as a Chinese medicinal material makes it hard to get accepted on the international market.

Resveratrol in grapes, however, is mainly in the vine, the skin and the seeds, with very little or none in the flesh, so what you extract from grapes is very low in yield. Which is why resveratrol extracted from grapes, a plant that is both food and medicine, costs far more on the market than resveratrol from knotweed.

Last, technique. How to extract and synthesise resveratrol quickly and safely is something a number of people are working towards, and there has been no great breakthrough. And resveratrol, being highly bioactive and much affected by its environment, is extremely demanding of process and technique; how to put it stably into skincare remains a challenge.

Having read it all, Li Lan found that Zhang Lin's team favoured resveratrol as the main component, and hadn't committed because of the number and difficulty of the problems. The material showed she had run extractions: the yield came out lower than the literature indicated, and since extracted resveratrol is a white powder, a visible antioxidant effect requires between ten and twenty per cent, at which point emulsifiers and oils make it greasy and prone to clogging pores. Cost plus technique, and the team had turned to other actives to see whether something more suitable existed.

Li Lan also thought resveratrol was probably the best choice. She opened the shop and searched knotweed and grape, and found antioxidant material under L3 for both — though no good cosmetic has only one raw material.

The shop showed that with resveratrol extracted from grapes as the main component the other materials came to over forty; with knotweed, over sixty. Given knotweed's side effects and its contested standing internationally, she chose grapes.

Since resveratrol can only be taken from the vine, skin and seeds, the growing of the grapes matters enormously. Existing research shows red grapes markedly higher in resveratrol than other varieties, making them the best raw material, and Zhang Lin's own experiments had used ten French red varieties.

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Some grape skin and other material remained in the store from the earlier work, so Li Lan led the group's existing four people in starting again from the extraction.

In the meeting room, a man in glasses at the head of the table presented the earlier results. "These are the previous figures. Averaged out, a hundred grams of grape skin yielded ten milligrams of resveratrol and a hundred grams of seed one and a half. Which means that for a fifty-gram jar of cream, even at the minimum ten per cent, five grams of resveratrol needs at least fifty kilos of raw material. And by the major cosmetics companies' annual reports, raw material cost for a jar of cream is held to about ten per cent of the retail price. On recent market rates a kilo of wine grapes costs twenty yuan at the lowest, so the resveratrol extraction alone comes to a thousand yuan in materials."

Zhang Lin, also present, added, "And that's the cost at ten per cent. Yields vary by variety and by part of the plant, and not by much overall — never mind extraction at volume.

"And by our estimates the good wine grapes are all in France, which will mean finding suitable varieties and growing regions there, and the price will very likely rise again.

"Most importantly, no cosmetic has only one active. The ten per cent in that material is the minimum; at twenty or even thirty the cost doubles again, and with the other actives on top, even priced low a jar of cream would come to over ten thousand yuan. There aren't many creams above ten thousand on the international market, and most of them are gimmicks built on packaging — a gold ornament, that kind of thing. A plain ten-thousand-yuan cream is not common."

Which is why they'd had to set resveratrol aside for the moment and look at other actives. The proportion extractable from grapes is simply too low and the material cost too high, and this is one of the largest difficulties facing any company wanting to use it. With knotweed, the cost and the difficulty both drop by more than half — which is why some companies pass knotweed resveratrol off as grape.

Businessmen chase profit; there are a great many actives, and nobody stubbornly pours everything into one. Not that it's absolute, because the returns on a breakthrough are enormous. The classic case is Olaya, which spent over a century researching Pro-Xylane, came to understand it completely, and made vast sums from the products built on it.

There were cosmetics on the market with resveratrol in them, and Zhang Lin's survey found most contained very little of it, purely as a selling point — and some unscrupulous companies used knotweed resveratrol as the raw material.

Li Lan had read her file and looked a good deal up. The yield Zhang Lin's team had achieved was not in fact low — above average, arguably. It still wasn't enough.

Zhang Lin looked at her. "Resveratrol synthesis currently runs at one in ten thousand. Is there a better method behind your insisting on it as the main active?"

There was something like expectation in her voice that she wasn't aware of. Perhaps Li Lan did have a way.

Li Lan neither nodded nor shook her head, and after careful consideration said, "I'll try."

Which reassured Zhang Lin more than half, inexplicably. Remembering what Li Lan had produced before — there was no denying she had an inexplicable trust in her.

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After the meeting, Li Lan restarted the work with the others on the shop's material, and here the advantage of doing her experiments at Cerulean showed. The others had doubts, and because of who she was the work went more smoothly than expected.

"It actually worked?"

Mid-June, in the laboratory, five people in white coats looked at the display and talked in excited undertones. Three months of work had met the target they'd set: resveratrol purification at one in a thousand. Ten times better.

When she'd stated that target three months ago they'd thought she was joking; nobody had ever heard of extracting resveratrol from grapes at one in a thousand. And now the result was in front of them and they had no choice but to believe it — and it was a result they'd arrived at step by step, with no possibility of fabrication. If that ratio got out it would astonish a great many people.

Three months' work succeeding, Li Lan was excited too and rather more restrained about it; the shop's figures were better than one in a thousand and better in quality besides. This was the limit of what they could manage, and reaching the shop's numbers would probably mean starting with growing the grapes. Something to think about later.

The other four looked at her with genuine conviction. As project head she'd had absolute authority over the experiments, and if for the first three months they'd worked to her instructions because of who she was, they now accepted her willingly as the lead, considerably younger than them though she was.

"Engineer Li, the extraction's worked. What next? Settling Rejuvenate's formulation?" The Engineer Li was entirely sincere.

Li Lan looked at the four of them, full of fight, and smiled awkwardly. "Next I have a dissertation to defend."