@Emily:
We are very sceptical towards those "2nd generation SRCP's".
As Kakalakingma said, the ingredients are Copper chloride (which has nothing to do with copper peptide and is just cheap blue blue dye basically) and hydrolized soy protein, which is a run-of-the mill emulsifier.
I avoided criticizing Dr. Pickart but since you leave me no choice - It is our position that his SRCP's can be assumed to contain hardly any GHK-Cu unless it is proven by lab analysis that it does.
Copper peptides are extremely expensive because this complex molecule is
devilishly hard to synthesize. The copper peptide we are talking about, GHK-Cu, is called
Glycyl-L-histidyl-L-lysine-Cu(2+) and as any chemist can see, this has little to do with the simple Copper chloride salt. Copper peptides cost almost twice the
price of gold, gram-for-gram. You can
verify that for yourself. It is therefore hard to make a profit on a large bottle with a GHK-Cu product. At the very least, one would have to sell such a bottle for several hundred dollars to make a modest profit. If there is no GHK-Cu on the ingredient list (in a high concentration) and if this can't be independently verified, it's safe to assume it's a scam, sorry to say. Dr. Pickart can come here and elaborate - I just go by Kakalakingma's remark that the stated ingredients are
CuCl2 and hydrolized soy protein. No mention of GHK-Cu. If that's correct, and his further observations/remarks suggest so (even though he himself gives Dr. Pickart the benefit of the doubt), then I do not believe the product contains any significant concentration of copper peptides. Please bear in mind that Dr. Pickart is in the Copper "peptide" business to make money and the fact that he is mentioned half a dozen times in the footnotes of the copper peptides Wikipedia article and in many studies can either mean he is a respected scientist or a relentless self-promoter. The studies I found on copper peptides that mention him, seem to have largely been paid for by himself. He donated the copper peptides, for example, making him an investor, influencer and stakeholder in the study. This is all too common nowadays. Don't forget that he used to be, and to a large extent still is, the only one hyper-promoting and agressively selling these products, using near-fraudulent claims and doubtful formulations of products that have no copper peptides on their ingredient list, but are suppost to perform "much better". To the bottom line, no doubt. Searching for "Dr. Pickart" on Google gives as search result #1 "Stay young / fountain of youth". Snake oil, people. Copper peptides, the real GHK-Cu ones, have some beneficial effect on the skin but they can by no means make you "stay young" or are the "fountain of youth". Commercial hype. It is highly questionable whether his "second generation skin remodelling copper peptides" in fact contain a medically significant amount of them.
Peptides do form when proteins and CuCl are combined, but then I'd like to know the exact type of peptides and their concentration. There has been no study on his 2nd gen copper products, they don't contain GHK-Cu and the FDA did not approve them as a drug. Kakalakingma called his office and his assistant said the type and concentration of the peptides was their secret. Dr. Pickart would already be a multi-millionaire if he started a copper peptide factory according to his magical chemical miracle method. A gram of GHK-Cu goes for around 70 dollars on the world market. 13 kilo of soy and copper chloride would then be sufficient to yield him a million dollars worth of GHK-Cu. All he'd need is a bucket of soy protein and a bucket of Copper chloride, mixed in a bathtub filled with water of the required purity and temperature. Say 250 dollars' worth of ingredients.