grown, not fished

pdrn is polydeoxyribonucleotide: fragments of dna, short enough to be absorbed. almost all of it in skincare comes from salmon — from the milt, the part of the fish nobody eats. korean clinics have been injecting the salmon version for two decades and it is what put pdrn on the map.

ours comes from panax ginseng root. it is third on our ingredient list, and the dna fragment itself is on there as sodium dna, last. same molecule class, different origin.

why the root

three reasons, in the order they mattered to us.

the first is that it works without an animal in it. four of the people who reviewed this formula said so before anyone asked them to, two of them in the title of the review. that is not a marketing angle we invented; it is the thing people noticed.

the second is smell. fish-derived ingredients need to be masked, and masking means fragrance. there is no fragrance in this bottle because there is nothing to cover up.

the third is that ginseng is what korea has actually used. 인삼 has been in korean medicine for centuries. it is a local ingredient with a local history, which is a better reason to put something in a bottle than a supply chain.

what we are not going to tell you

we are not going to print a percentage. the same formula gets sold elsewhere as 100,000 ppm, and that number measures the ginseng extract, not the active inside it. it is a big number in the wrong unit. we would rather leave the box empty than fill it with something that means nothing.

and we are not going to borrow the clinic's numbers. injected pdrn and topical pdrn are not the same thing: one goes under the skin, the other goes on it, and the effect on the surface is milder. anyone quoting injection studies on a bottle you buy online is hoping you will not notice the difference.

what is left

what is left is the thing you can check. thirty-one ingredients, printed in full on the ingredients page. five ceramides, np ns as eop ap, which you can count off that list yourself. no fragrance. and pdrn that was grown rather than fished.

questions: hello@kimjie.com. one of us reads it.