Cosnessens puts cooling effect packaging to the test
clinical testing centre, has been drafted in by the Cosnessens
Company to undertake a clinical and subjective trial of its Ice
Source skincare brand. Tom Armitage reports.
As CosmeticsDesign.com reported last week, the Ice Source product is housed in an innovative packaging concept, developed by French sister company Thermogen, which is designed to provide a rapid cooling solution for a range of cosmetics products.
According to Fadi Khairallah, founder of Thermagen, the company has adapted a technique developed by the European Space Agency (ESA), which "uses vacuum evaporation to absorb the heat energy of the product, thereby cooling it at high speed."
Cosmetic companies have long favoured the use of rapid cooling in their skin care products, as it allows a faster absorption rate into the skin, which therefore produces visibly faster results.
Laboratoire Dermscan is recognised internationally for its innovative, complex, and multiparametric studies. In order to validate Cosnessens' claim that the Ice Source product produces 'an immediate lifting effect', when applied to the skin, two main objectives had to be fulfilled.
The first was to quantify the immediate lifting effect of the Ice Source personal skin care product by analysing prints on a group of women who had crows' feet.
The second objective included analysing the responses given by a second group of women to a subjective evaluation questionnaire, which dealt with the organoleptic characteristics of the Ice Source skin care product, as well as appraising the product's packaging.
At Laboratoire Dermscan, results are tested using the patented Skin Image Analyser (SIA). In testing the efficacy of cosmetics products on the skin, measurements are taken before and after, using Ice Source on a treated crow's foot and then on an untreated one. An oblique lighting casts shadows that are then observed with a camera.
This technique - also known as 'grey level analysis' - enabled the laboratory to obtain a roughness index, characterising the relief of skin surface. Some of the parameters involved in the testing included analysing total wrinkled surface, as well as analysing the number and average depth of the cutaneous microrelief of the average and deep wrinkles.
After one hour of conducting the test, between 60 and 80 per cent of participants observed a decrease described as 'significant' in the number of average and deep wrinkles.
A clinical appraisal of the packaging also produced pleasing results for the company, with many volunteers saying they liked the 'pleasant texture, easy penetration, and application' of the Ice Source product, as well as the original and innovative aspect of the packaging.
The results of the test also confirmed the efficacy of the product and packaging as a dual concept - over a third of the women who tried the product without the cooling effect of the packaging claimed the product 'did not provide significant results'.
