Size: 1.7oz (50 ml)

Your Best Face Defend is the perfect addition to your day time skin care routine to protect your skin from environmental and sun-induced damage. The formula is packed with concentrated photoprotective peptides, antioxidants and botanicals to encourage brighter skin and more even tone, allowing you to enjoy the outdoors without any concern for your skin's safety.

Defend includes ingredients like vitamin E, tripeptides, olive squalane, and licorice extract that work together to shield skin from damage that accumulates daily, while maintaining the skin's integrity and balancing combination or oily skin. The results, with daily use and ideally paired with your favorite mineral sunscreen, include firmer and more toned skin, reduced dark spots and a more resilient appearance. Use during your daytime time routine by evenly massaging a small amount to your face, neck and hands. After it dries, layer with a mineral sunscreen afterwards for ideal results and full UV protection. Just sit back and enjoy while the Defend serum does all the heavy lifting.

Tested and reviewed for at least 30 days by Marta.
If my memory serves me properly, Your Best Face Defend was a day cream and anti-aging treatment for the breakout prone. I am sure that’s oversimplifying things, but I really want to focus on the newly formulated Defend, which is intriguingly far from simple. I’d go so far as to say YBF has rethought the day cream.

You see, a day cream is typically about hydration, it may have an SPF thrown in and care will be taken to ensure it plays nice under makeup. Your Best Face has, however, taken some very novel ingredients and upped the ante to protect from and prevent the UV damage that leads to aging.

The first of these is Preventhelia, a tetrapeptide that protects the skin from UV light. It works very specifically by neutralizing 4-HNE, a nasty free radical that is known for causing oxidative stress. Actually, it is amongst the most prolific and cytotoxic of the free radicals. The cool thing about Preventhelia is that it prevents future damage and, therefore, may guard against future aging.

While not exactly a substitute for sunscreen, this ingredient is said to be photoprotective and, in particular, protect DNA from UVA-induced damage by 69% (source) and promote its own repair system. I think this is pretty exciting.

Next up is Juveleven. This is a peptide that mimics something called FOXO3a (it’s full name is Forkhead Box 03, goodness knows why). It has a complex role in regulating different cell activities in everything from stem cells to mature cells. And it seems to prevent oxidative stress by upregulating antioxidants. Furthermore, a variant of FOXO3 has been associated with longevity in humans (source). By using UV radiation to cause damage to cells, researchers have shown that FOXO3 comes to the rescue and prevents cell death. The maker if Juveleven says that its peptide diminishes UV-mediated DNA damage by 16.6% in 24 hours.

From rice protein is another exciting ingredient. It goes by the name of Colhibin and it prevents collagenase (also known as MMP), one of the main culprits in early aging. When collagenases are triggered by sun (UV) light, they break down collagen. Enter Colhibin to stop them in their tracks and prevent premature skin aging.

All of the ingredients (there’s some of YBF’s standards as well) make for a great preventative and protecting cream. It would be great for 30-somethings and 40-somethings looking stave off the ravages of sun damage. For those of us with some damage, it is a great boost to our repairing serums and gives a cutting edge arsenal to our sunscreens.

Defend is a lightweight cream that can be worn on its own, or — as I do — layered over serums and under makeup or additional (conventional) sun protection. Try it and rethink the day cream.

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