PDRN Has Quickly Taken Over Skin Care

01.05.2026, 02:33 allure.com

Four little letters have taken over the skin-care industry as of late: PDRN, the newest K-beauty ingredient popping up in moisturizers, masks, and serums. It’s part of the regenerative skin-care wave featuring treatments that promise to make your cells act younger. While the acronym itself sounds more clinical than catchy, PDRN is a whole lot easier to remember than polydeoxyribonucleotide, the technical term it stands for, which is an ingredient derived from salmon DNA.

“PDRN is an upcycled ingredient from the food industry’s salmon farms—it’s not like people are raising salmon to get this DNA,” says cosmetic chemist Perry Romanowski (who can’t help but chuckle at several points during our interview). “That happens in the cosmetics industry a lot—we get leftover stuff from other industries, like petroleum from oil production. Otherwise, these ingredients would just be waste.”

The short answer is salmon sperm. The more nuanced, more accurate answer is that it is fragments of salmon DNA taken from said sperm. These samples (the sperm) have been collected from salmon farms and purified (hopefully a lot). Microscopic pieces of that salmon DNA are then sold by ingredient suppliers to brands and cosmetic chemists who blend PDRN with other active ingredients in their formulas.

Maybe you think this sounds intriguing, exciting, or is a whole new level of crazy for an industry that’s already peddled beef tallow balms, bee venom creams, and snail mucus serums. Maybe you’re just curious to know if there’s any chance that it works.

Or maybe you’re wondering who had the idea to take salmon sperm and put it on our skin in the first place. It’s a fair question.

Long before K-beauty brands set their sights on PDRN, it started as an injectable, but not for smoothing wrinkles. Initially, it was injected near chronic wounds, such as diabetic ulcers, to aid in healing—a therapeutic approach that’s been supported by studies dating back to the early 2000s.

It’s not uncommon for researchers to look to the oceans for new drug sources. They do, after all, comprise the world’s largest habitat, explains one peer-reviewed article on marine drugs. DNA-derived medications, meanwhile, have been studied since the 1970s, and research suggests sperm “are the most appropriate cells to provide highly purified DNA without risk of impurity,” as detailed in a study published in the journal Frontiers in Pharmacology.

So there you have it: sperm, salmon, DNA. The path that led us here isn’t quite as out-of-left-field as you might have thought. “PDRN has been used in regenerative medicine for years, especially in Europe and Asia. There is credible clinical use of [injectable] PDRN in medical settings for wound healing and ulcers,” says Mona Gohara, MD, a board-certified dermatologist in Hamden, Connecticut, “and it is generally well-tolerated for medical use.”

“There is credible clinical use of [injectable] PDRN in medical settings for wound healing and ulcers.”

There’s also a link between these medical PDRN injections and that holiest of holy grails in skin care: collagen production. When PDRN is injected into the subcutaneous layer (the deepest layer of the skin) during wound treatment, it has been shown to engage adenosine A2A receptors on skin cells, according to a study published in Biomaterials Research. That can help with wound healing, in part, because activating these receptors can trigger—you guessed it—new collagen formation.

“Think of the skin cell as a ball, and the receptor is sticking out on top of it like a light switch,” explains Dr. Gohara. “PDRN injections are basically turning on the switch to wake up the cells and hopefully get them to produce more collagen.”

As for the link between salmon sperm and human skin, that has to do with the composition of DNA itself, no matter where it comes from: “The rungs of the DNA ladder are made up of the same four chemicals,” says Romanowski. So, when salmon DNA meets human skin cells, it can bind to those A2A receptors.

Because A2A receptors are involved in collagen production, the skin-care world’s hope is that putting PDRN in creams and serums can also “reinvigorate the skin’s own system for turning these receptors on,” says Dr. Gohara. “It’s a fascinating, if not magical, bridge between medicine and aesthetics.”

The thinking goes, if PDRN can engage with cell receptors as a regenerative injectable drug, then when it is used topically as a skin-care ingredient, perhaps it can also “help stimulate tissue repair, boost microcirculation, and reduce inflammation—basically encouraging skin to heal and function more efficiently, improving skin texture, elasticity, hydration, and overall radiance,” says Dr. Gohara.

Non-medicinal PDRN has been around for years in Korea: Salmon sperm facials may kick off with microneedling, followed by a salmon sperm serum applied all over the skin. These and injectable PDRN skin boosters—which reach more superficial layers of skin vs. subcutaneous wound-healing injections—preceded and ignited the current PDRN topical skin-care craze.

Says Melissa K. Levin, MD, a board-certified dermatologist in New York City, “PDRN’s claim to fame is that it is one of the most popular skin-care treatments in a very discerning market—Korea—and has been for over a decade.” But whether you’re talking about injectables, facials, or serums, “there aren’t a ton of clinicals supporting [its use in aesthetics],” she adds. “The marketing is moving faster than the science.” (There is no FDA-approved aesthetic injectable form of PDRN in the US.)

“The marketing is moving faster than the science.”

The promise of making skin act younger through an unforgettable ingredient like salmon sperm is marketing gold. Salmon sperm is just quirky enough to grab our attention and pique our interest. “The beauty industry thrives on the ‘next thing,’” says Romanowski. “If you can create a story around an ingredient, that ingredient is going to be hyped up.”

Adds cosmetic chemist Kelly Dobos, it’s an evocative way of dangling that “promise of youthfulness we’re all chasing.”

There’s a difference between hype and hard data, “and I’m skeptical as to how well the data is substantiating PDRN’s skin-care claims,” says Dobos. Studies on PDRN as a skin-care ingredient have largely been conducted in petri dishes, with PDRN applied directly to cells. Says Romanowski, “The evidence that we have on PDRN’s benefits is in cell cultures, where it can do things like turn off melanin production. That’s not the same thing as saying, ‘If you put this in a cream, and put that on your skin, it’s going to work.’”

Also, there’s a lack of data showing that PDRN truly works when it’s used in skin care. It all boils down to a basic physics problem: “There’s a principle in skin care that something can only penetrate your skin if it’s small enough—typically 500 daltons,” explains Romanowski. “These fragments of DNA are 50 to 100 kilodaltons in size, so that’s 1,000 times bigger than they would need to be in order to penetrate.” And they’d need to penetrate all the way to the dermis (the middle layer of skin) to reach receptors on cells—sitting on the surface of the skin isn’t nearly enough.

And this assumes that there even is PDRN in your skin care by the time you slather it on—a major assumption you probably don’t want to make. As a raw ingredient, PDRN is plagued by a bunch of “questionable situations in cosmetic formulation,” says Dobos. For starters, it has to be kept at a specific temperature to remain stable. This won’t be replicated in your bathroom vanity, so “there’s concern about whether PDRN can survive the [minimum] two-year shelf life of a skin-care product,” says Dobos.

Actually, the ingredient might not even survive the formulation process: “PDRN is wildly fragile,” says cosmetic chemist Marisal Mou. “It is unstable, finicky to formulate with, and [prone to] oxidation,” which means it breaks down when exposed to air. We are talking about genetic material from a living creature, after all.

"PDRN is wildly fragile... unstable and finicky to formulate with."

To really pile on here, even if you could buy PDRN in an airtight container, secured in a box that is set to the optimal temperature, and it is somehow able to defy physics to get through your skin, there’s a chance it could carry proteins from its donor with it. What’s the problem there? “Proteins on any biological materials can be a source of allergic reaction in skin care,” says Dobos. Some brands are looking into plant-derived PDRN, she adds, but you could run into similar allergen issues with that.

The push for vegan PDRN seems to be coming mostly from US brands, says cosmetic chemist Amanda Lam, who is intrigued by the fact that we tend to tolerate more from the K-beauty sphere. “If a Western consumer is buying a Western brand, they care more about it being cruelty-free,” she observes, “but they'll buy snail mucus from a Korean brand.”

“It’s fascinating to see the magnitude of how quickly PDRN has blown up in the skin-care world,” says Lam. “The idea of it is just so flashy.”

The attraction goes beyond the novelty of sperm in skin care. “There’s so much discussion about living healthier and longer,” says Dobos. “PDRN is just part of our innate desire to want to stay younger longer (I know I want to), but I’m very skeptical about whether PDRN’s benefits in wound-healing models can translate to topical application.”

Dobos also thinks the rush to jump on the PDRN bandwagon could be detrimental to the ingredient’s long-term reputation. “We saw it with CBD in cosmetics, too, frankly; we just weren't sure of the benefits of it, but it sounded really interesting. This is another case where there's a lot of hype, but not enough substantiation for me to put my faith in it,” she explains.

The same could be said for topical exosomes, the other darling of the regenerative skin-care movement: Like PDRN, they are being hyped for their ability to make skin act younger. And like PD