Healthy Beauty

Tools & Resources

CSI Miami: How to Use DNA Techniques to Solve Your Beauty Crimes

Font Size

WebMD Feature from "Marie Claire" Magazine

Marie Claire magazine logo Just as the world’s most popular show, CSI: Miami, uses advanced DNA techniques to crack murder cases, you can now solve your own beauty crimes with the latest scientific breakthroughs. Had your skin profiled lately?

“I’ve been here twice,” sneers a suspect on a recent episode of CSI: Miami, “and all you’ve got is a Q-Tip.” Cut to: the bad guy being led to jail, the DNA swabbed from his mouth having matched blood spilled at a crime scene. “And that’s all I need,” deadpans the show’s hero, Horatio Caine, played by David Caruso.

CSI: Miami ’s Emily Procter Takes a Strand . . .

Hair scientists at Procter & Gamble now magnify strands 1000 times to determine the health of hair and what kind of help it needs.

SKIN DEEP

If CSI: Miami is the planet’s number-one show, it’s partly because, in a scary world, we all sleep better knowing that science, not mere instinct-driven sleuthing, is working for the common good. Who ya gonna call: Columbo, shuffling around in a ratty raincoat, or a forensics-fortified CSI guy cruising in a Hummer?

Cut to: women at cosmetics counters and spas asking themselves, Am I going to trust my skin to a pretty, perfumed luxury cream, or one with a science degree? Thanks to breakthroughs like the Human Genome Project—which identified and stored all 20,000-plus genes—and other recent skin-science discoveries, DNA-based methods and products that target your cells are being used to fight crimes of beauty. And why not call perfectly preventable damage to skin, hair, and nails what it is? A crime.

The humble Q-Tip, an essential low-tech beauty tool since its invention in the 1920s, is enjoying newfound fame and clout. In fact, it provides the first clue to you at Dermagenetics’s New Jersey lab, which processes a swab from your cheek and concocts your own personalized, genetically guided moisturizer. “We test your skin-aging genes,” says John Souza, Dermagenetics’s director of sales. “For example, the ones that indicate your collagen breakdown or wrinkling capacity. We’re all a mixture of advantaged and disadvantaged skin-aging genes called Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms or SNPs [pronounced snips].” So, whereas someone may have an advantaged SNP for eliminating chemical pollutants, she may have a disadvantaged one for protecting against UV rays. “Our lab would then select active ingredients in optimal concentrations just for her,” says Souza. “Whenever you hear a brand boasting that 30 percent of customers reported improvement in reduction of fine lines, it means that the formula wasn’t right for the other 70 percent.”

What Lies Beneath

Like forensics sleuth Jonathan Togo of CSI: Miami, modern skincare methods look deep into your skin for clues. Sephora’s Skinphysical reveals UV damage not seen by the naked eye.