For years, Vitamin E was the best thing I'd put on my skin. The problem: every product was either half seed oils, or unpleasantly sticky. The clean ones were unpleasant. The pleasant ones were dirty. I gave up and built it myself.

SKIN.FOOD is the result. One anti-aging serum, one oral supplement, both built around ultra-pure, food-grade Vitamin E with nothing in the bottle that shouldn't be there.

About Anabology

I'm Anabology. I started SKIN.FOOD because the cleanest, simplest, most minimalist version of what works for my skin and cells didn't exist on the shelf, and the products that came close were unpleasant to actually use.

The full reasoning behind every formulation choice is public on my X feed. Read why I picked what I picked, in detail, before you decide it's for you.

The Vitamin E story

Vitamin E protects your cell membranes from reactive oxygen species. Put another way: it offsets the damage seed oils do. That's the job it does in your body, and it's what the topical does for your skin.

But not all Vitamin E is the same.

You can buy fully synthetic alpha-tocopherol — one isolated form, lab-made, wrong stereochemistry. Pure, but incomplete.

Or you can buy natural, which contains all four tocopherol forms (alpha, beta, gamma, delta). Gamma is where most of the unique benefits live. This is the real thing.

The catch: natural Vitamin E is extracted from plants that also contain PUFAs, and nearly every "natural Vitamin E" product on the market is more than 50% seed oils after purification — manufacturers leave them in because they think the seed oils are "beneficial." (They aren't.) You can tell which one you have by color: real ultra-pure Vitamin E is amber. If yours is yellow, it's not pure.

A few products do source it clean — Idealabs' TocoVit and Kenogen's Progest-E both use highly purified full-spectrum natural Vitamin E. But pure Vitamin E is thick and sticky, so they're unpleasant to wear on skin.

The fix

SKIN.FOOD's SF Topical starts from the purest natural Vitamin E I could source. I thinned it with olive squalane — a light plant-derived oil that mimics your skin's natural sebum — so it spreads cleanly without feeling greasy. Then I added DHEA (from wild yam) at Ray Peat's optimal dose of 5 mg/mL.

What's in the bottle:

• 

  66% olive squalane

• 

  33% highly purified mixed tocopherols (non-synthetic Vitamin E — the highest concentration on the market in a squalane-E base)

• 

  5 mg/mL DHEA (from wild yam, anti-aging)

The most minimalist anti-aging formulation I could think of. No fragrance, no fillers, no surprises. The same Vitamin E goes into E Complete, the oral supplement — straight, food-grade, taken by mouth.

That's the whole brand. If you've been looking for the same product I was looking for, this is it.

— Anabology