UGLYFACE® CALM

Affron®is the only saffron extract standardized to ≥3.5% Lepticrosalides® (US10933110B2) by HPLC.  

Affron® is proven in clinical studies to improve emotional stress scores, mood, and sleep quality. It does this by promoting neurotransmitter balance, facilitating neuroplasticity, antioxidant effects, softening brain signal responses to occasional stress, and supporting healthy inflammatory response.

People often report Affron® being something they can definitely feel, especially at doses of 28mg+ (our 4-capsule serving is 30mg).

Apigenin is a natural flavonoid found in numerous plants including chamomile (think sleepy relaxing chamomile tea), it influences GABA synthesis pathways promoting better sleep and stress management. When it comes to natural extracts, it's important that they're standardised to a high level of the active ingredient - our apigenin is ultra-high 98% purity.

Magnesium is mineral that's responsible, amongst other things, for regulating your HPA axis (your body's stress response system). When your mind is racing and your body feels physically tense, it's because your brain is flooded with excitatory signals. Magnesium physically blocks those signals, lowering cortisol and allowing your central nervous system to actually calm down.

Many people are deficient in magnesium, and in the CALM formula we hit a specific dose (125mg elemental magnesium per 4-capsule serving) to top up this important mineral, and to work synergistically with apigenin, forcing your brain our of a wired state and into deep sleep.

Why Magnesium Bisglycinate? Well, in this form, the elemental magnesium is bound to two molecules of the amino acid glycine. This matters because your gut has specific "dipeptide transport channels" designed to absorb peptide proteins. By binding the magnsium to these two glycine molecules, we are potentially making use of this transport channel, essentially smuggling the magnesium through your intestinal wall. This allows it to bypass the normal digestion route, resulting in more bioavailability and significantly less gut issues than other common (and cheaper) forms of magnesium like magnesium oxide or citrate.

The Glycine Bonus: Because we use the bisglycinate form, you aren't just getting magnesium, you're getting a decent dose of glycine too.

To give you 125mg of elemental magnesium in the 4-capsule serving, we use 862mg of Magnesium Bisglycinate. That means you're getting 737mg of glycine alongside the magnesium.

In clinical sleep science, a standalone 3-gram (3,000mg) dose of glycine is used to naturally drop your core body temperature, which is a physiological requirement for enterint deep sleep. Our 737mg of glycine gives you roughly 25% of that dose. We aren't going to BS you and say this replaces a standalone glycine supplement, but it does act as a significant supporting mechanism for improving sleep quality - one that you simple do not get from other forms of magnesium.

PEA is like your bodies internal ice pack - it's a fatty acid amide your body produces on-demand when experiencing pain and inflammation.

When you're training hard, dealing with chronic stress, or recovering from an injury, your body simply can't keep up. You hit "PEA Exhaustion" leaving your nervous system unprotected.

PEA has been shown to help support sleep quality, but isn't a "traditional" sleep-aid ingredient. However, many of us are dealing with niggly aches & pains, and not only does PEA help support proper recovery for those - it also helps combat any interruption they're causing your sleep, quietening the physical "background noise" that keeps you tossing and turning at night.

We use a high-purity 99%+ PEA (our most recent batch was 99.8% purity), matching many of the more expensive "name brand" versions of PEA like Levagen®.

L-Theanine is the cornerstone of many of the most popular sleep stacks, and for good reason. L-Theanine is a unique amino acid that supports brainwave manipulation and may interact with GABA pathways too. It doesn't knock you out or sedate you, but rather helps your brain move into an alpha-wave state, the same neurological frequency yo uachieve during deep meditation.

To be totally honest, the scientific community is still unsure on how exactly L-Theanine works, we just know that it does. The research shows that these Alpha waves are most effective when you are at resat with your eyes closed, which makes L-Theanine the perfect flexibility bridge between night- and day-time CALM use. During the day it sits in the background, smoothing out the jittery, anxious edges of your morning coffee or energy drink so you can stay focussed, calm, and in your flow-state. But the second your head hits the pillow and you close your eyes, it starts to slow your brainwaves down, easing the late-night racing thoughts before they even begin.

When you're stressed out, your brain floods with an excitatory chemical called glutamate. That is the stuff that makes your mind race at 100 miles an hour when you're staring at the ceiling trying to sleep. Zinc blocks the NMDA receptors (where the glutamate interacts) and acts as a plug, stopping the glutamate rush and allowing your neurons to stop over-firing.

Zinc is also a key component of your natural melatonin production. Your body converts the amino acid tryptophan into serotonin and then into melatonin - zinc (alongside magnesium) is responsible for that final serotonin > melatonin conversion. By restocking your zinc levels, you're making sure your brain has enough raw material to create enough melatonin, right when the sun goes down.

In CALM, you're getting Zinc, Magnesium, and Vitamin B6 (as P-5-P), which completes the famous ZMA sleep stack - legendary in sports science for supporting quality sleep & recovery.

You can take all the sleep-inducing, calming ingredients in the world, but if your brain doesn't have the baseline fuel to process them, you're just wasting your money. Vitamin B6 is a mandatory "co-factor", or helper, for your brain's chemistry.

Your body cannot synthesize GABA (your brain's relaxing chemical), Serotonin and Dopamine (your happy chemicals), or Melatonin (your sleep hormone) without adequate Vitamin B6 - so topping it up is super important for ensuring you're actually making the most out of your sleep supplement.

Why P-5-P for B6? You'll often see B6 on generic supplements as "Pyridoxine HCl" - this is an inactive, cheap form that takes a lot of effort to convert into a useable form. If you're chronically stressed, your body is already going to be pretty taxed so giving it more work seems a bit silly.

We only use Pyridoxal-5-Phosphate (P-5-P) for our B6. This is the bioactive form of B6 that bypasses liver conversion entirely and goes to work right away.