Kinetin is a plant-growth hormone, and its technical name is N6-furfuryladenine. What makes kinetin interesting are the in vitro and animal studies demonstrating its effect as a growth factor. Most of these studies were conducted by Dr. Suresh I. S. Rattan, PhD, DSc, Associate Professor of Biogerontology at the University of Aarhus, Denmark, who happens to be the patent holder for N6-furfuryladenine for use on aging skin. Rattan told me, "Normal cells, as they divide and age, go through a progressive accumulation of changes that are irreversible until they reach a stage where they finally die. The in vitro form of creating cellular aging is called the Hayflick Phenomenon, named after the researcher who discovered this method of studying cellular aging in a laboratory setting."
"…A young cell is plump, round, smooth. As the cells age, they become irregular, flattened, and large, full of debris…when you grow normal cells in the lab they have a limited number of times they multiply and divide—termed a cell's replicative life span. But when I added N6-furfuryladenine to these cultures the cells did not age as fast, the process slowed down dramatically…."
"Topically no one knows how or if N6-furfuryladenine is being used by the cell...It has only been observed for in vitro systems…We are curious about negative effects…In cell cultures when a concentration of say 250 micromolars of N6-furfuryladenine was used, we got good results, but when we used 500 micromolars of N6-furfuryladenine the cells started dying."
I suspect that when it's applied topically, kinetin isn't of much use to the skin cell, and even if it could be utilized, there probably isn't enough kinetin in any product to have a negative or positive impact?but that is only a guess, no one knows for sure (Source: Dermatologic Clinics, October 2000, pages 609-615).
