Matcha green tea: Antioxidant, preventive beauty and an answer against pollution

Consumers’ growing concern for pollution and its effects on health has a new answer. Matcha green tea: antioxidant, effective anti-aging ingredient and an answer for those looking for preventive beauty products. Moreover, this ingredient blends in with the healthy and natural skin trend, while  it also provides an effective opportunity to link antioxidants with protection against pollution in the cosmetic market.

The cosmetic market has seen a surge of skin care product launches in the UK and the US that mention concepts like ‘wholesome nourishment’ or ‘superfood actives’, linking beautiful skin with a healthy diet.

However, there’s room to grow: according to Mintel, just 3% of product introductions in the beauty market made antioxidant claims during the past three years.

Matcha Green Tea, a very concentrated kind of traditional Japanese green tea, has long acquired a reputation for benefiting health. This ingredient stands as the right answer for brands to explore pollution-free claims and promote a radical scavenger and preventive well-aging effect that provides an effective protection for healthy skin. 

What is Matcha 

Due to its “superfood” reputation, Matcha green tea has rapidly become one of the most sought-after ingredients. Deeply rooted in Japanese tradition , it has been ingrained to a whole ceremony revolving zen practices for centuries, but the world has only recently caught up with its many benefits. 

In fact, used as part of cosmetic products, this rich ingredient is known to have antioxidant, antibacterial and relaxation effects for the skin, which provide a preventive anti-aging approach to its activity .

Drawing from its current prominence in the food industry, Matcha Green Tea has a huge potential to be promoted as a free-radical neutralizer as part of the cosmetic industry.

How Matcha green tea works as an antioxidant

This high-quality fine-powdered green tea derives from Camellia sinensis, a woody perennial tree originally from Asia that presents a life span of more than 100 years.

Its benefits for health derive from this ingredient’s rich nutrient composition. Matcha is one of the richer sources of antioxidant substances. This includes flavonoids, especially rutin, but also polyphenols and vitamin C. In fact, its infusion presents the highest antioxidant potential among all other tea types.

The tea’s antioxidant activity takes place mainly due to its polyphenol content, and more specifically its catechin content. Within the group of six catechins present in this type of tea, EC, EGC, ECG and EGCG have been demonstrated to exert the highest antioxidant action, the latter having been proved to be the main responsible agent for the antioxidant power of green tea. 

Moreover, it’s been proved that the powdering process that Matcha goes through provides it with increased EGCG than “normal” green tea, thus also increasing its antioxidant effect.

Another important chemical present in matcha powder is chlorophyll, which plays a huge role within the antioxidant defense system, preventing oxidative stress. 

Natural antioxidants such as these are considered to be the most important factors in the prevention of skin aging due to oxidative stress.

The market for Matcha in beauty

There are many reasons why the Matcha Green Tea is embraced today as one of the most innovative and demanded cosmetic ingredients.

First of all, the narrative around Matcha Green Tea involves traditional Japanese zen ceremonies, where its relaxing effects are part of a ‘Japanese ceremony’ storytelling. This is supported by this tea’s chemical composition, where the combination of Arginine and Theanine contribute to a stress-reducing effect. 

Matcha Green Tea antioxidant thus creates a new line of holistic cosmetic routines for face, body and mind, where mindfulness also plays a great role and aligning perfectly with the current wellbeing trend in cosmetics. 

Provital’s Matcha Green Tea Extract: the benefits

At Provital, we’ve incorporated Matcha green tea to our catalog, providing a new possibility for brands to innovate and offer effective product claims using natural, sustainable and trendy ingredients. 

There are many reasons why the cosmetics market is ready to welcome  Matcha green tea as the new preferred ingredient. We sum up some of Provital’s Matcha green tea extract best benefits for skin treatments:

• By being such a nutrient-rich ingredient, it becomes the perfect choice for facial sheet masks that give an immediate boost, energizing both skin, body and mind.
• Matcha Green Tea antioxidant is 99.5% natural origin, thus highly sought in the current natural cosmetics market. Plant-based ingredients are demanded by consumers because of their familiarity, accessibility and association with health,
• It provides the perfect mix to prevent skin aging for the increasingly natural-oriented consumer. However, this is done through a new approach that promotes healthy aging and preventive beauty.
• UV radiations produce several harmful effects such as inflammation and immune suppression. Additionally, it induces IL-1 proliferation, which plays an important role in skin hypersensitivity and skin tumor proliferation. It has been found that green tea exerts photo protective actions preventing this kind of problems and reducing erythema formation.
• There is growing interest in antioxidants for their ability to fight pollution and neutralize its negative effects, including faster skin aging, dehydration and inflammation.
• The fact that new research suggests that an antioxidant-rich diet can mitigate the effects of air pollution opens new opportunities for brands to link antioxidant ingredients to anti-pollution claims.

This detox claim, presented in the food and drink market in the past, can now move on by the beauty and cosmetics market. 

This natural extract provides the perfect mix to prevent skin aging for the increasingly natural-oriented consumer. However, this is done through a new approach that promotes healthy and preventive aging, while also using a centuries-old ingredient from traditional Japanese culture that is now a trend in the “superfood” movement.