It’s the dictum we were told to apply to our diets, too: Avoid processed foods, and if your grandmother wouldn’t recognize the ingredients, don’t eat it. But in beauty, that means forgetting that even water has a chemical name. Begoun adds: "It’s also a question of getting the right molecular weight, which has to be crafted. Don’t get me wrong, I need plants, I need some of those extracts. But I can’t readily get the benefits they offer. It needs tweaking." Plus, we face unnatural aggressors: pollution, glycation from sugar-loaded diets, smoking, alcohol... it’s a tall order to expect a wholly natural solution to all that. "Some of the best ingredients for skin — niacinamide, retinol, ceramides, peptides — they aren’t natural! You can’t make them natural and get them into your skin," Begoun says. "But you can bioengineer them to make them seem natural to your skin and be absorbed efficiently, so your skin thinks, 'Aha! I know what to do with this.'"