Ever since Zelens reformulated its products to take out the fullerenes C60, I've been meaning to take a look at Dr Brandt's Lineless Cream in which this powerful anti-oxidant is still a key ingredient.

Zelens, a UK company, stopped using fullerenes after a furore in the press that was mostly kicked off by Consumer Reports. The Nobel Prize-winning discoverer of fullerenes was quoted as huffily saying that cosmetic cream was trivial and he would err on the conservative before using it on the skin. All of which is not quite the same as saying it isn't safe for topical use and there doesn't seem to be any hard evidence that it isn't. Still Zelens clearly didn't want the aggravation.

Fullerenes C60 is sometimes described as the most powerful anti-oxidant known to man and is dubbed the radical scavenger. So until the safety concerns become more coherent, it seems to be worth looking out for. Having said that, I'm not a huge fan of Dr Brandt's products.

They often seem to have an inordinate amount of the things that make a cream a cream: emollients, thickeners and emusifers and the like. Lineless Cream is no exception. It also has at least three silicones for that my-skin-feels-so-soft-feeling that is, well, just skin deep.

Lineless Cream does have some good things besides fullerenes. There is collagen, extracts of tea, algae, vitamin C and something called methylsilanol hydroxyproline aspartate, which is a protein in collagen and elastin.