Why do brows turn gray?

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1. Background

The issue of pigments, especially in eyebrows, developing a gray hue is a common concern among PMU artists. Unraveling the reasons behind this and identifying prevention methods might seem challenging initially, but clarity emerges with a deeper understanding. This article compiles insights from discussions with 46 experienced PMU artists and incorporates research from Powderbrows.com Research Center from 2019 to 2023, including ongoing studies. Contributions from 32 EU artists, nine from the UK, and five from the US enrich this analysis. It also includes insights from two chemists, a dermatologist, and a physics specialist in optometry to ensure a comprehensive understanding of the data.

While there's general agreement among artists on the statements' validity, it's important to note that even seasoned professionals may misunderstand how pigments behave in the skin.

This article is dedicated to demystifying the reasons behind the grayish tones often seen in semi-permanent brow pigments and offering practical guidance for practitioners. Rather than focusing on the well-known fact that oversaturation and high carbon content can lead to darker, often grayish colors, we explore the mechanics at play more closely. We'll closely examine the behaviors and interactions of pigment particles to understand more precisely why brows turn gray, providing insights beyond the surface-level explanations.

2. ”Red” as a Partially Solvable Problem

The shift of semi-permanent makeup pigments to gray or blue shades in the skin is primarily related to the carbon content in organic pigments. In contrast, the reddening of brows often stems from interactions between inorganic or mineral components like iron oxides and elements within the skin, such as the protein ferritin.

Iron Oxide-Based Colorants

Iron oxides are crucial in the pigment palette for semi-permanent makeup, offering a natural skin affinity and a wide color range. However, their long-term stability is susceptible to oxidation-reduction (redox) reactions, influenced by factors like UV light, skin pH, and biochemical interactions, including those involving proteins like ferritin.

Iron oxide pigments' tendency to change oxidation states, especially in an unmodified state, can lead to undesired color shifts. For example, magnetite (Fe3O4), containing iron in various oxidation states, may oxidize, shifting its color towards an unwanted reddish tone. The cosmetic industry has adopted silanization, a technique from other technological fields to address this.

Silanization

Silanization involves treating iron oxide particles with silane compounds to create a protective barrier around each particle. This barrier stabilizes the pigment, maintaining its original color and reducing oxidation state changes due to environmental factors. By chemically bonding silane groups to the iron oxide particles, the pigments' surface chemistry is altered, enhancing their resistance to natural degradation processes in the skin. This modification is instrumental in preserving the intended color and longevity of the pigments used in semi-permanent makeup.

3. ” Gray” as Inevitable

Avoiding "Red" Brows

For pigments with iron oxide concerned with "brows turning reddish," discoloration can be significantly diminished through chemical modification to create hybrid pigment molecules. This involves fusing the inorganic iron component with an organic matrix like organometallic silica, resulting in a pigment less prone to oxidative changes. This fusion maintains the original hue's integrity and boosts the pigment's safety and performance within the skin's complex environment.

Gray as a Given of Small Carbon Particles

The issue of "brows turning grayish" due to carbon content has an element of inevitability. Fine carbon pigment particles react to the skin's unique environment and physiological processes, gradually shifting towards grayish tones. This shift occurs because the small carbon particles interact with surrounding tissues with their large surface area, affecting how they absorb and scatter light over time, thus altering the perceived color.

While the grayish shift is somewhat unavoidable, it's not entirely uncontrollable. Factors like the carbon particles' size and shape, the implantation depth, and the pigment application's density can influence the color changes. Precise techniques can minimize particle migration and accumulation, reducing the color's fading or graying rate.

In summary, while the reddish shift in iron oxide-based pigments can be mitigated through chemical modifications, managing the grayish shift in carbon-based pigments is more challenging. It can be somewhat managed but not entirely avoided due to carbon's inherent properties and interactions with the body's biological systems.

4. Why Brows Turn Gray

We've recognized that brows using organic pigments containing carbon tend to turn grayish over time. To understand this phenomenon more deeply, let's explore the reasons behind this color shift. This explanation will unfold in three distinct sections.

Understanding Lightfastness

This section will address the inherent stability of carbon black pigments (CI 77266) against light and its impact on their long-term appearance in the skin. We'll focus on how carbon black behaves in isolation within the skin, especially its interaction with and resistance to light exposure. Understanding the pigment's lightfastness is crucial to comprehending its behavior over time.

Molecular Structure as the Secondary Cause

Next, we'll examine the molecular structure of carbon-based pigments, focusing on the role of covalent bonding in carbon molecules. This exploration will reveal how these strong molecular bonds contribute to the pigments' resistance to metabolic breakdown within the skin. While significant, we'll identify carbon's molecular structure and covalent bonds as secondary factors in pigment retention.

Particle Size as the Primary Cause

The core of our discussion will revolve around the particle size of pigments and its paramount role in determining the retention and stability of carbon particles in the skin. We'll explore how the size of these particles affects their likelihood of being engulfed by phagocytes, their ability to migrate within the dermal matrix, and their propensity to aggregate. A detailed comparative analysis of particle size and molecular structure will highlight the predominant influence of particle size in the retention and degradation processes of carbon particles in semi-permanent makeup.

5. Understanding Lightfastness

What is Lightfastness?

Lightfastness is a crucial factor affecting the durability of mixed-color permanent makeup. It refers to the ability of a pigment's components to resist fading or color changes when exposed to light sources such as the sun's UV rays or artificial lighting. Pigments with high lightfastness remain stable and true-to-tone over time, resisting light-induced fading. This trait is especially vital for pigments with more complex chemical structures, as they are generally more stable and less prone to degradation.

The Blue Wool Scale

The Blue Wool Scale, ranging from 1 to 8, is the industry-standard method for measuring a pigment's lightfastness. A score of 1 indicates low lightfastness (least stable), while a score of 8 represents high lightfastness (most stable). This scale is crucial for artists, particularly when custom-blending colors, as it provides insight into each pigment's fading resistance, directly impacting the longevity of the permanent makeup.

Implications in Permanent Makeup

After application, pigments in the skin inevitably begin to fade and degrade over time, a process accelerated by exposure to light. A pigment containing ingredients with varying lightfastness may fade at different rates, leading to uneven coloration that can appear patchy or discolored. For instance, some pigments and inks age into ashy or warm hues over time due to lightfastness inconsistency. Therefore, understanding and utilizing pigments with consistent lightfastness is key to ensuring a more predictable and uniform appearance of permanent makeup over time.

6. Degradation of Different Colorants

In the field of semi-permanent makeup, it's known that pigments containing carbon black (CI 77266) often have additional organic compounds to create various shades, such as yellow, orange, or red. There's a consensus among artists and chemical evidence suggesting that the lightfastness index of these extra colorants—measured on the Blue Wool scale—is generally lower than that of carbon black, which boasts the highest rating of 8. Physically, this implies that these compounds are more prone to photodegradation, potentially fading faster from the skin than carbon black.

Titanium Dioxide as an Accelerant of Degradation

Despite manufacturers' claims that all colorants have similar retention properties, promising that pigments won't prematurely fade to gray, such assertions require critical examination. A crucial aspect to consider is the inclusion of titanium dioxide (CI 77891) in pigment formulations. Titanium dioxide can reflect UV rays when used, especially in small particle sizes (around 100 nm or smaller). This reflection can hasten the degradation of red and yellow colorants, causing them to fade more quickly from the skin than their lightfastness index alone might indicate.

Empirical observations have revealed that some colorants can fade significantly within six months after implantation. Therefore, it's essential to consider the pigment formula's overall composition when assessing its longevity and how different colorants might degrade over time.

7. TiO2 High Reflective Index

Titanium dioxide (TiO2) is renowned for its high refractive index and potent UV light scattering capabilities, often utilized in sunscreens to shield the skin from UV radiation. When TiO2 nanoparticles are mixed with other organic colorants, their small size and extensive surface area allow them to scatter UV light more effectively. This increased scattering can lead to several outcomes.

Increased Exposure. The scattering can expose other colorants mixed with TiO2 to a wider spectrum of light wavelengths, potentially accelerating their photodegradation as they absorb more photons. Catalytic Activity. TiO2 is also a photocatalyst, which can prompt certain chemical reactions when it absorbs UV light. While beneficial in applications like self-cleaning surfaces, in pigments, this can cause the catalytic breakdown of nearby organic molecules, including the colorants.

A chemist reviewing the article noted that TiO2's impact on other colorants' degradation depends on factors like TiO2 concentration, the stability of the organic colorants, and the pigment mixture's formulation. Nano-sized titanium dioxide, in particular, may accelerate the photodegradation of colorants due to its enhanced UV scattering and photocatalytic activity. The actual degradation rate will depend on the specific formulation and environmental conditions.

Examples of Rapidly Fading Colorants

Certain colorants are known for fading quickly from the skin, including specific reds, yellows, and oranges listed by their color index numbers.

Conclusion on Lightfastness Impact

Lightfastness is a critical factor in explaining why carbon black (CI 77266) remains in the skin with its superior lightfast qualities after other colorants have faded. This illustrates lightfastness's role in carbon black's persistence relative to other colorants used to create various hues in semi-permanent makeup. Photodegradation differences between carbon black and other colorants are why brows "become" grayish. However, to understand why brows remain grayish, we need to explore the molecular structure of the organic compounds.

8. Carbon Molecules and Gray Brows

Molecular Structure as the Secondary Cause

The persistence of carbon molecules in the skin is sometimes attributed to their robust covalent bonds, providing a stronger molecular structure than inorganic molecules' ionic structures.

Inorganic Iron Oxide Particles

Inorganic iron oxide particles, typically found as hematite (Fe2O3) and magnetite (Fe3O4), possess an ionic atomic structure, forming a crystalline lattice held together by ionic bonds. These strong bonds usually impart stability to these pigments. However, their charged nature influences interactions within the skin's biological environment, possibly leading to changes in the iron's oxidation state and potentially causing pigment degradation or color shifts.

Organic Components such as Carbon

Organic pigments, including carbon black, are formed with covalent bonds where electrons are shared more evenly, resulting in less charge separation compared to ionic bonds. These structures are susceptible to degradation processes like enzymatic breakdown and photodegradation. Organic pigments, especially those imparting red, yellow, and orange hues, may degrade more readily due to their susceptibility to UV degradation and the lack of strong ionic interactions.

Comparative Degradation

Iron oxide inorganic pigments are generally more stable than organic carbon-based pigments in semi-permanent makeup due to their ionic bonds, making them less susceptible to enzymatic reactions commonly resulting in pigment breakdown.

Conclusions on Molecular Structure as the Secondary Cause of Retention

It's not solely the covalent structures of organic compounds that contribute to their persistence in the body, nor is it the ionic nature of inorganic compounds that makes them degrade. The differential degradation rates are due to multifaceted reasons.

The designation of the molecular structure of carbon as the secondary cause for retention in the skin is more about how carbon molecules can be formatted into desired particle sizes rather than the molecular properties they exhibit in the skin. The actual reasons behind differential degradation rates involve a combination of structural properties and environmental interactions.

9. Particle size as the cause of retention

When examining carbon black (CI 77266) in semi-permanent pigmentation, it's important to understand that it comprises at least three distinct types, differentiated by production methods and particle sizes.

Types of Carbon Black

Channeling (Black 6 or Channel Black): Produced from crude oil and gas, it has the smallest particles (90-100 nm) and is lightweight, often used for eyeliners and shading.
Furnacing (Black 2, Base Black 2, or Furnace Black): Made from petroleum oils in a furnace, it has a medium particle size (200-300 nm) and is suitable for eyeliner techniques.
Thermal Processing (Black 7 or Thermal Black): Derived from ethylene gas, this type has the largest particles (up to 500 nm) and is harder to apply, making it suitable for eyebrow techniques.

Retention and Particle Size

Carbon retention in the skin is intricately linked to particle size and chemical properties.

Aggregation. Larger aggregates of particles are more likely to be processed by the immune system, but looser aggregates of more organic hydrocarbons could migrate deeper into the skin.
Molecular Stability. Stable carbon-carbon and carbon-hydrogen bonds in carbon and hydrocarbon molecules resist breakdown by skin enzymes or cells.
Less Immune Reactions. Carbon particles typically provoke a milder immune response than iron oxides, reducing phagocytosis and removal.
Phagocytosis. Larger particles are more prone to phagocytosis, but scientific studies suggest less efficiency for particles smaller than 100-200 nm, which may remain longer in the dermal layer.
Compatibility with Skin's Lipid Matrix. Organic compounds like "Furnace Black" integrate easily into the skin, especially suitable for oily and thick skin types.
pH Levels. Particle size influences pH, affecting compatibility with the skin and potentially improving retention.

Therefore, particle size is a primary factor in retaining carbon black pigments in semi-permanent makeup. While molecular structure contributes to the pigment's stability, the physical dimensions of the particles chiefly determine their behavior in the skin, influencing immune response, solubility, and migration. Understanding the role of particle size is crucial in comprehending why certain carbon-based colorants persist in the skin, emphasizing its significance in the retention and degradation of pigments.

10. The Antidote to Brows Turning Gray

While completely preventing the graying of carbon in the skin is impossible, there are strategies to alleviate this issue. Here are three primary methods to mitigate the gray appearance.

Using Larger Particle Sizes

Thermal Black (Black 7) with its larger particle size of around 500nm can help. Larger particles are more likely to be engulfed by macrophages, and they absorb shorter wavelengths like violet and purple light, reflecting warmer colors such as blue, green, and yellow. This results in a browner, warmer appearance in the skin, as opposed to the cooler, grayer look from smaller particle variants of CI 77266.

Avoiding Too-Deep Implantation

Deep implantation can lead to the Tyndall effect and potential pigment migration, exacerbating the grayish reflection. While it's challenging to avoid this effect entirely due to the mobility of smaller particles, precise and careful implantation practices can minimize the occurrence and its visual impact.

Decreasing the quantity of Carbon

Artists should endeavor to understand the pigments they use. Analyzing the pigment mix for an educated guess about the carbon content is vital. Additionally, avoiding the use of carbon-based colorants on skin areas already high in carbon is crucial. Over time, incremental increases in skin carbon can lead to saturation, where the effect of other colorants is temporary. However, carbon saturation can be addressed with laser removal procedures.

By employing these strategies, artists can significantly reduce the chances of semi-permanent makeup turning an undesirable gray, maintaining the intended coloration as closely as possible. These methods help manage the inherent challenges of carbon's physical properties and interaction with the skin, offering a more refined approach to pigment application and formulation.

11. Conclusions

Artists often discuss the stability of carbon black colorant (CI 77266) in the skin, attributing the persistence of small carbon black particles (around 100 nm) and those with a high hydrocarbon content, like Furnace Black (Black 2), to the general behavior of carbon molecules. However, it's important to recognize that these particles consist of thousands of molecules for accuracy.

The retention of a grayish hue in the skin is specifically due to the properties of smaller carbon black particles and those rich in hydrocarbons. This retention is influenced by factors such as evasion from phagocytosis, suitable pH levels, compatibility with the skin's lipid matrix, lower immunogenicity, aggregation tendencies, and molecular stability. Importantly, the molecular stability is attributed to the atomic structure and the strength of carbon bonds within the particles.

In summary, while the initial "turning" of brows to gray can be mainly linked to the photodegradation discrepancies between carbon black colorants and other pigments, the persistent grayish appearance results from the inherent characteristics of smaller carbon black pigment particles and those with significant hydrocarbon content. Understanding these aspects is key to addressing the issue of gray brows in semi-permanent makeup.