SYN-AKE is sold on a story that is easy to repeat and hard to check: a wrinkle ingredient inspired by a viper. The story is true as far as it goes. What it leaves out is how little of the viper is in the molecule, and how thin the human record is once the story is set aside.
What the molecule is
The INCI name is dipeptide diaminobutyroyl benzylamide diacetate (CAS 823202-99-9). PubChem's record, CID 71465152, resolves it to beta-alanyl-L-prolyl-2,4-diaminobutyric acid benzylamide, supplied with two acetic acid molecules as a salt.
Three things about that structure are worth stating plainly, because the trade name hides all of them:
- Two of the three units are not protein amino acids. Beta-alanine and 2,4-diaminobutyric acid are not among the twenty that make up human proteins. Only proline is.
- The chain is capped with a benzylamide, a synthetic end group rather than the free acid a natural peptide chain ends in.
- The INCI name says "dipeptide"; at least one review table says "tripeptide-3". A 2025 review of anti-ageing peptides in Biomolecules lists it under the second name. Both describe the same molecule, and only the INCI name appears on a label.
The weight depends on whether the salt is counted. PubChem gives the diacetate salt as 495.6 g/mol. Removing two acetic acid molecules (60.05 g/mol each) leaves about 375.5 g/mol for the peptide itself. Either figure puts it under the 500-dalton line usually cited for passive skin penetration, which almost none of this site's other ingredient entries clear. Our guide to the skin-peptide evidence explains why that line is a heuristic rather than a law.
The viper, measured
A 2018 review of snake venom peptides in Toxins (Munawar et al.) gives the provenance in one line: the cosmetic ingredient is a peptide mimic designed using waglerin-1 as a template. Waglerin-1 comes from Wagler's pit viper, Tropidolaemus wagleri, and blocks the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor on muscle.
UniProt entry P24335 gives the precursor as 24 amino acids, cleaved to a 22-amino-acid waglerin-1. The cosmetic mimic has three units. It borrows the idea of acting at the muscle receptor, not the sequence.
The same review adds a detail the marketing never carries: human, mouse and rat receptors differ in their sensitivity to waglerin-1, and it is most toxic to mice. A toxin's potency in one species is not a measure of what a three-unit mimic does in human skin. The review attributes the muscle-relaxation mechanism for the cosmetic to its supplier, Pentapharm, rather than to a study.
Set beside Argireline, the difference is the step each targets. Argireline is designed to interfere with the release of acetylcholine from the nerve; SYN-AKE is described as acting at the receptor that receives it. SNAP-8 is Argireline's longer relative on the same release step.
What PubMed holds
Searched through NCBI E-utilities on 2026-09-17, across the INCI name, "SYN-AKE" and "syn ake":
| Search scope | Records |
|---|---|
| Title or abstract | 1 |
| All fields | 2 |
| Waglerin, title or abstract (the toxin, for scale) | 26 |
The toxin it imitates has twenty-six times the literature of the ingredient. The two records that name the ingredient are these:
- Gok, Budama-Kilinc and Kecel-Gunduz, 2023, Journal of Biomolecular Structure and Dynamics. Computer docking against matrix metalloproteinases and SIRT1, an antioxidant assay, and cell-culture safety tests. No skin, no people, and none of it tests the muscle-receptor mechanism the ingredient is sold on.
- Zhu et al., 2026, International Journal of Cosmetic Science, from L'Oreal's research centres in China, the US and Japan. A serum containing five actives — acetyl hexapeptide-8, this peptide, gluconolactone, niacinamide and laminaria extract — tested ex vivo and in two clinical studies of 50 and 42 people. The abstract reports improvements against baseline and names no vehicle arm for the clinical studies. With five actives in one formula, no result in it belongs to SYN-AKE.
The trial PubMed does not see
The only placebo-controlled human study located is not in PubMed at all. Campiche et al., International Journal of Peptide Research and Therapeutics 2021;27:1009-1017 (DOI 10.1007/s10989-020-10146-z, verified against the DOI registry).
What the abstract reports:
- 57 volunteers aged 50 to 65, split into a placebo group and an active group.
- The active group applied a formulation containing 4% of a cosmetic product containing the peptide, for four weeks.
- Wrinkles were assessed by image analysis, expert grading and optical measurement.
- The difference from placebo reported as significant: less wrinkle area and length on the forehead while frowning (p < 0.05).
Three limits follow directly from that description:
- Four percent of a supplier product is not four percent of peptide. The abstract does not state the peptide concentration in the finished formulation.
- The significant comparison is one region in one expression. The abstract mentions a visible decrease in wrinkles in the active group generally, but the placebo comparison it quantifies is the forehead while frowning.
- The abstract does not give the split between the groups or a disclosure of who funded the work. Both would be needed to weigh it.
The same paper includes a second, unrelated observation — similar wrinkle patterns in eight mothers' relaxed faces and their daughters' expressions — which is interesting but says nothing about the ingredient.
Commonly repeated figures such as "52% wrinkle reduction" trace to the supplier's own product literature, which reports maximum values in volunteers rather than group differences against a control. Those figures are not published in a journal we could open, so they are not reported here.
Where it turns up
SYN-AKE is almost always one peptide among several, which is part of why its own evidence is hard to separate:
- The Ordinary's Multi-Peptide + HA Serum lists it ninth of 51 ingredients, among seven peptides — see our analysis of that formula.
- COSRX's The 6 Peptide Skin Booster Serum lists it tenth of 44 — see the COSRX formula analysis, which first noted how close its weight sits to the penetration threshold.
Neither label states its concentration. Our guide to reading an ingredient list explains what the position of a name can and cannot tell a reader.
What the evidence does not show
- It does not show that the molecule reaches facial muscle through intact skin in a person.
- It does not show a dose-response relationship: no study located compares concentrations.
- It does not show an effect of the peptide alone beyond one four-week comparison in one facial region, in a journal outside PubMed.
- It does not show safety at a finished-product concentration from human data; the only safety figures in the indexed record are cell-culture and bacterial mutation tests inside the 2023 docking paper.
What it does show is a clear design rationale, a real toxin behind the name, a molecule small enough to pass the usual size test, and one placebo-controlled signal that is narrower than the marketing around it.
Sources and dates
- PubChem compound record CID 71465152, dipeptide diaminobutyroyl benzylamide diacetate — formula, weight, synonyms and structure, read 2026-09-17.
- UniProtKB P24335, waglerin-3 precursor cleaved into waglerin-1, Tropidolaemus wagleri — UniProt, read 2026-09-17.
- Munawar A, Ali SA, Akrem A, Betzel C. Snake venom peptides: tools of biodiscovery. Toxins 2018;10:474 — PMC6266942.
- Campiche R, Pascucci F, Jiang L, et al. Facial expression wrinkles and their relaxation by a synthetic peptide. Int J Pept Res Ther 2021;27:1009-1017 — DOI 10.1007/s10989-020-10146-z.
- Zhu M, He X, Zhu Z, et al. The effect of a serum containing acetyl hexapeptide-8, dipeptide diaminobutyroyl benzylamide diacetate and gluconolactone on skin biomarkers, wrinkles and skin texture. Int J Cosmet Sci 2026 — PubMed 41668671.
- Gok B, Budama-Kilinc Y, Kecel-Gunduz S. Anti-aging activity of Syn-Ake peptide by in silico approaches and in vitro tests. J Biomol Struct Dyn 2024;42:5015-5029 — PubMed 37349941.
- Pintea A, Manea A, Pintea C, et al. Peptides: emerging candidates for the prevention and treatment of skin senescence. Biomolecules 2025;15:88 — PMC11762834.
- PubMed record counts via NCBI E-utilities, run 2026-09-17.