Each capsule contains glycerin, marine collagen, and hyaluronic acid; that last one, says Dr. Gohara, is the major player in the formula. “Hyaluronic acid is a potent humectant that helps to absorb water from the ambient environment to enhance and plump,” she explains.

In product testing done by Droplette, subjects had up to 40% fuller-looking lips immediately after use, and those plumping results lasted up to six hours. According to Madhavi Gavini, CEO and cofounder of Droplette, the benefits were cumulative: The baseline surface area of lips displayed a 30% increase — as long as participants continued to use the device once a day — over a 14-day period.

“Even when using an injectable hyaluronic acid, it requires, at the minimum, half a syringe to note a difference to this degree,” says Dr. Gohara. “A topical product would have to be supercharged and scientifically very unique to create these same results.”

The technology behind the product:

Gavini was working as a therapeutic drug designer when she attended a conference and heard about a rare pediatric dermal disease that was tricky to treat. Researchers were struggling to effectively deliver the necessary drugs to the affected areas of the skin. So, Gavini rolled up her sleeves and grabbed her colleague Rathi Srinivas, a chemical engineer and medical diagnostics developer, and now the CTO and cofounder of Droplette, to build a solution.

Gavini describes the result of their collaboration as “a transdermal drug delivery system that could get large therapeutics into the skin in a way that wouldn’t hurt.” She and Srinivas looked, initially, to needle-free jet injections, which use a high-pressure stream of fluid to deliver drugs into the bloodstream. “But we didn’t want anything to get in the bloodstream, we just wanted it to get into the skin,” notes Gavini. “So instead of a jet, we thought, What if we have a spray with tiny droplets [of liquid] to get [hard-to-deliver] ingredients gently into the skin?”

They named the device Droplette, secured funding from NASA and the Department of Defense, and worked with Tufts Medical Center in Boston to develop it. They also realized — after talking to family, friends, and we assume some Allure readers — that the same elements that make the device effective for drugs could make it effective for over-the-counter products like a glycolic acid, retinol serum, or perhaps a lip plumper.



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