Retinoid vs. retinol: what’s the difference?Updated a year ago
What’s the difference between a retinoid and retinol? It can be pretty confusing since often the two terms are used interchangeably.
Basically, retinoid is the umbrella term for all ingredients that have an impact on the skin’s retinoic acid receptors.
Retinol is a type of retinoid, but there are many others: Tretinoin, retinal, adapalene, retinyl palmitate, and more. Throughout this post, we’ll discuss the effects of the different types of retinoids in more detail.
This chart shows the strength of each type of retinoid, from very mild (and largely useless) synthetic derivatives like retinyl palmitate to ultra-powerful retinoic acid.
To understand what’s behind these levels of strength and their measured skin impact, it’s important to understand retinol’s mechanism of action. Basically, we have receptors in our skin that are activated by retinoic acid (there are actually 3 of them: alpha, beta, and gamma).
Retinoic acid is the only retinoid that can impact those receptors directly. All other retinoids have to convert into retinoic acid before they can have their own impact.
That conversion process has limited efficiency, so the more conversions a retinoid has to go through, the less impact it’ll have on the skin.
It gets a little more complicated than that, though, so let’s dive even deeper into all of the different retinoids!