Donald Trump has a new skincare line called BioCé. I find the thought of The Donald giving me anti-aging advice almost as scary as if he were to style my hair. But I am nothing if not intrepid in the pursuit of truth in beauty and my skeptic-ometer was wavering dangerously at the patented peptide and “the multi-mineral chrono-energizer”. With no comprehensive ingredients list to be found on the BioCé website, I ordered the BioCé Repair Serum ($62) to see what it was all about.

One of the amusing things about BioCé Repair Serum is that The Donald’s lawyers seem to have insisted on getting almost more space on the package than the marketing people. One whole side of the box tells us that BioCé is made exclusively for and sold by The Trump Network. This is actually a multi-level marketing organization, colloquially known as pyramid selling. I guess this means that I will be hounded by The Trump Network reps for the rest of my life.

Anyway, what of the Reapir Serum? Well, it’s as about as convincing as The Donald’s rug. When you look at the ingredients it is as if you are reading them backwards. Harsh preservatives that usually (mercifully) trail at the end, such as phenoxyethenol and chlorphenesin, are amongst the most dominant ingredients. And right at the very bottom is BioCé’s secret sauce, the patented peptide that comes from nicotiana sylvestris (woodland tobacco).

Which is a pity as this is a rather promising anti-wrinkle ingredient. Earlier this year, Italian scientists created a sugar-peptide mix by digesting the glycoproteins in the tobacco plant’s cell walls, speculating that the peptide may have a similar amino acid composition to human collagen. The sugar-peptide mix upregulated the expression of SIRT1 and SIRT6, two proteins of the sirtuin family that are thought to be linked to aging.