What Are Exosomes and Why Are Skincare Experts Raising Red Flags? (2025)

By now, you’ve astir apt seen “exosomes” wafting crossed your For You Page, possibly sandwiched betwixt a promo codification for snail mucin and personification rendering beef tallow. Scroll done SkinTok agelong enough, and you’ll deed a flood of videos hyping exosome therapy, exosome serums, and exosome treatments promising nan tegument wellness of a cherub.

Skincare companies person seized nan term. Marketed arsenic miraculous regenerative agents, you’ll find them connected $300 facial menus, successful post-micro-needling procedures, and crossed influencers’ skincare routines.

What Are Exosomes?

An exosome is simply a teeny sac wrong a cell, aliases what a intelligence mightiness telephone an extracellular vesicle. They enactment arsenic mini mailbags, shuttling mRNAs, lipids, and different familial worldly done nan compartment membranes from 1 compartment to another.

Exosomes are a portion of nan body’s soul messaging system, regulating everything from compartment maturation to hormone accumulation and cistron expression. They’re microscopic, measuring astir 40 to 100 nanometers across, truthful mini they make a reddish humor compartment look monolithic successful comparison. Scientists first discovered them nether a microscope backmost successful nan 1960s, but they didn’t summation important attraction until nan early 2000s.

Why Are Exosomes Controversial?

In medicine, exosomes are being studied for crab therapies, neurodegenerative diseases, and drug transportation systems. Because they bespeak nan authorities of nan cells from which they originate, crab cells often merchandise exosomes that incorporate unsocial molecular fingerprints. Scientists are already utilizing these biomarkers to assistance successful nan early test of conditions for illustration prostate cancer. The imaginable for early, non-invasive discovery crossed a scope of diseases is substantial.

Because exosomes tin transverse biologic barriers and present cargo, researchers are besides exploring them arsenic vehicles for targeted drugs. Additionally, they clasp imaginable for coiled healing, inflammation reduction, and insubstantial regeneration.

Naturally, nan beauty manufacture caught wind. Now, exosomes are successful moisturizers, serums, and hairsbreadth injectables, promising to repair your tegument barrier, boost collagen production, and reverse aging.

But here’s wherever it gets murky. Most published objective studies connected exosome skincare are small-scale aliases deficiency rigorous controls. Exosomes, dissimilar pharmaceuticals, person nary fixed composition, nary standardized dosing, and deficiency bully manufacturing practices (GMPs). This variability makes diligent outcomes difficult to predict. And their contents whitethorn displacement from batch to batch. Sources besides vary—from mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) and platelets to works cells and umbilical cord tissue.

“Not each exosomes are nan same,” says Jodi Gurney, cofounder of Exotropin, a skincare marque trading what they telephone exoceuticals. “The source, accumulation process, and cargo each find really effective they are.”

“There's presently nary exertion that allows manufacturers to put exosomes into a bottle, put it connected a shelf, and support them from degrading,” says Jimmy Sung, MD, a board-certified integrative and reconstructive surgeon specializing successful regenerative aesthetics. “Even if they say, ‘We put X magnitude in,’ there’s nary measurement to verify really galore stay active. And they won’t put that successful penning aliases attest to it nether oath.”

If companies were to purify exosomes to pharmaceutical-grade standards, they’d request to categorize them arsenic drugs. Many harvester them pinch accepted skincare ingredients for illustration hyaluronic acerb aliases Vitamin C to skirt that. This besides intends that if consumers are noticing affirmative results, it whitethorn beryllium owed to nan additives (not nan alleged exosomes).

Are They Safe?

Exosomes aren’t unrecorded cells, truthful they transportation little consequence than stem compartment therapies. Still, they’re biologically active, meaning that contamination is simply a superior concern. Improper purification tin consequence successful products that incorporate unwanted cargo: viral miRNAs, immunosuppressive agents, and tumor-growth factors (to sanction a few).

“I personally debar utilizing non-autologous exosomes successful my believe unless I tin thoroughly vet nan product’s origin, information data, and system of action,” Hannah Kopelman, DO, a dermatologist specializing successful hairsbreadth and scalp disorders, writes successful an email to WIRED. “The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued warnings astir nan misuse of unapproved exosome products, and arsenic a practitioner, that raises a reddish flag. I can’t successful bully conscience connection a merchandise I wouldn’t usage connected myself aliases my ain family unless I’m afloat confident.”