Growth factors in skincare: what EGF and FGF do, and how oleosomes carry them

Plump's firming ingredients are the least explained category on the shelf. Most labels say "growth factors" or "peptides" and stop there. So here's the full picture: what they are, how skin uses them, and why ours travel inside tiny oil droplets from a seed.

What growth factors are

Growth factors are signal proteins. Your skin makes them to pass messages between cells: grow, renew, make more of what you're running low on.

The two in Plump are:

• EGF (epidermal growth factor), a small protein of 53 amino acids.¹ It binds to receptors on keratinocytes, the cells that build your skin's outer layer, and is involved in how that layer grows and renews.²
• FGF-2 (basic fibroblast growth factor), a larger protein of about 155 amino acids.³ It belongs to a family that signals through four receptors, including the ones on fibroblasts, the cells that make collagen.⁴

Growth factors vs peptides

Peptides are short chains of amino acids. Growth factors are longer ones, their bigger cousins. On an ingredient label they're both named as peptides: EGF appears as sh-Oligopeptide-1 and FGF-2 as sh-Polypeptide-1. That's why we call them biomimetic peptides. They match the sequence of the proteins your skin makes.

Most "signal peptides" in skincare are short fragments, a few amino acids long, designed to imitate a piece of a bigger signal. Growth factors are the full-length message.

Why they matter when hormones shift

Estrogen acts directly on the cells that build skin: keratinocytes, fibroblasts and pigment cells.⁵ When estrogen falls, skin gets thinner, with less collagen and less bounce.⁵ After menopause, skin collagen and thickness keep falling by roughly 1 to 2% a year.⁶ Fibroblasts also make less collagen as we age: in one study, cells from people over 80 made about a third less than cells from people in their twenties.⁷

So the signals that tell skin to keep building matter more, not less, in perimenopause and beyond. That's why Plump uses them to support the look of firmness.

Made in plants

Growth factors are delicate, and making them is the hard part. Ours are made in plants: Camelina seeds, grown in a growth chamber in France, produce the proteins inside the seed.⁸ No human cells, no animal cells, and the ingredient is vegan.⁸

What oleosomes are

Every oily seed stores its oil in tiny droplets called oleosomes, also called oil bodies. Each one is a drop of oil (a triglyceride core) wrapped in a thin skin of phospholipids, with proteins called oleosins studded through it.⁹ They're about a micron across, smaller than a red blood cell, and they make up 20 to 50% of the seed.¹⁰

They're nature's own packaging. Their job in the seed is to keep the oil stable until the plant needs it, and they're remarkably sturdy.¹⁰

Why oleosomes carry our growth factors

Growth factors on their own break down quickly. So each one is attached to an oleosin protein and travels inside the oleosome's own membrane.^8,11 That does three things:

• Protection. The growth factor is held in a stable natural structure rather than floating free.
• A gentler formula. Oleosomes are natural emulsions: oil already wrapped in a water-friendly skin.¹⁰ That means less reliance on harsh synthetic emulsifiers.
• Slow release. The system is designed to release the growth factors gradually on skin.

What the supplier's study showed

In a 28-day study run by our ingredient supplier, 60 people used a cream with 1% of either growth factor, or a placebo cream, twice a day. Measured with skin instruments, both growth-factor groups showed firmer-measuring skin, less visible dark spots and less water loss compared with where they started. The placebo group showed no significant change.¹²

Two honest caveats. It was the supplier's study, and it compared each group with its own starting point rather than testing the groups against each other. And it tested the ingredient in a simple cream, not Plump itself.

Together, EGF and FGF-2 support the look of firmness. That’s the job Plump does on top of our three pillars of care.

 

With care,
Afsheen & Samantha