Product Blend: 9 parts Vitamin A (as Retinyl Palmitate) and MSM Blend.
1 part Enhanced Absorption Complex (Uptake Blend)

Enhanced Absorption Complex (Uptake Blend):
Black Pepper Extract (10% Piperine)
Ginger Extract (5% Gingerols)
Cumin Extract (10:1)

Scientific Name: Retinyl palmitate (vitamin A ester)

Other Known Names: Vitamin A palmitate, retinol palmitate

What is it? Vitamin A - retinyl palmitate
Vitamin A is a fat-soluble vitamin your body stores in the liver. The form here, retinyl palmitate, is retinol joined to palmitic acid, a fatty acid, which is how animals store it in their own livers, so it's the "storage" form rather than the free one, and it's used because it's stable in a capsule where plain retinol isn't.

It's lab-made, but bio-identical to what's in liver, butter, egg yolk and full-fat milk. It sits in an MSM base: methylsulfonylmethane, a sulphur compound found in tiny amounts in fresh food and rainwater and made in quantity from the same chemistry as DMSO.

Why the name. Vitamin A is called A because it was the first, the "fat-soluble A" that two American labs found in 1913, as against the "water-soluble B" in rice bran.

Retinol is named after the retina, because that's where the chemistry of it was worked out. Palmitate is from palm oil, where palmitic acid was first isolated in 1840.

How long people have used it. As food, all of human history, liver, oily fish, egg yolk, butter, and the coloured plants your body converts into it. Both the Ebers Papyrus, written in Egypt around 1550 BC, and Hippocrates in fifth-century Greece mention liver specifically; we'll leave you to look up why.

As a named vitamin, just over a century. In 1913 Elmer McCollum and Marguerite Davis in Wisconsin, and Thomas Osborne and Lafayette Mendel at Yale, found independently that rats needed something in butterfat and egg yolk that they couldn't get from lard or olive oil. 

Jack Drummond in London gave it the name "vitamin A" in 1920. Thomas Moore at Cambridge showed in 1929-30 that the orange pigment in carrots, beta-carotene, turns into vitamin A in the body, which is why "carrots help you see in the dark" is one of the few bits of nutrition folklore with actual chemistry behind it.

Paul Karrer in Zürich worked out the structure in 1931 (Nobel 1937), and Otto Isler at Roche in Basel synthesised it industrially in 1947, which is what made cheap vitamin A possible.

Who used it. In Britain: everybody born after 1940, whether they knew it or not, the wartime government made vitamin A fortification of margarine compulsory in 1940 and it stayed compulsory until 2013, on top of the cod liver oil issued to every child under five. 

In the Arctic: the Inuit, whose diet was liver-heavy and vitamin A-rich, and who knew centuries before anyone measured it never to eat polar bear liver, a lesson relearned the hard way by the Antarctic explorer Xavier Mertz on Mawson's expedition in 1913, and the reason a vitamin A supplement is one you take exactly as directed and not by the handful.

George Wald at Harvard spent the 1930s-60s working out what retinol does inside the eye and got the Nobel Prize for it in 1967. MSM is more recent and more American: Stanley Jacob and Robert Herschler at Oregon Health Sciences University developed it out of DMSO research in the late 1970s and early 80s, and it's been sold as a supplement since.

Which part is used / Source: Lab-made vitamin compound
Bio-identical to the naturally occurring form of vitamin A found in food

Strength / Specifications: MSM + Retinyl palmitate (Vitamin A) blend

What exactly do we get? Each daily dose (1 capsule) provides 200 mg Vitamin A (as Retinyl Palmitate) and MSM blend, equivalent to 12,340 IU, plus 22 mg Enhanced Absorption Complex, supplied in vegetarian HPMC capsules.