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How Your Skincare Affects Your Immune System
Although pollutants pervade modern life, lifestyle choices serve as measurable mitigators
In our daily lives we routinely “dose” ourselves with an innumerable variety of different chemicals. Our food, drink, air quality and all environmental chemicals we use and are exposed to have to be processed, circulated through or trafficked out of our bodies. As such the types of chemicals that reach us from our environments have the ability to affect our health in many different ways. Even in a diet or skincare regimen free from additives, everyday foods are highly complex chemical mixtures, and so the quality of our food choices guide the quality of repeated “chemical inputs” that our meals provide our bodies with. Whereas a healthy body processes the dietary or skincare chemicals from wholesome sources as welcome nutrition, industrial and post-industrialised lifestyles have introduced innumerable chemicals into our environments that are either unnatural or unnaturally abundant. Despite the valid short and medium-term testing in place in most countries to establish skincare ingredients safety, some of these synthetic compounds have been repeatedly linked to damaging our immune system, especially with long-term exposure. At a time where many have gained a renewed respect for health and wellness, this article explores the scientific link between our daily skincare choices and our immune system.
The physical presence of the skin, as the body’s continuous outer surface, provides a “basic” protective barrier to unwanted microbes. Far from basic protection, the skin provides microscopic spaces for good bacteria to live, and some chemical deterrents against bad bacteria. Moreover, different “immune cells” are resident deep in the skin, and other immune cells can be recruited if there’s a lot of “heavy lifting to do”. With this terrain described, it may be easier to see how skincare products applied at the surface can have deeper, and even body-wide effects. A significant amount of evidence shows that disruption of the skin’s microbial community with inappropriate skincare permits pathogenic skin microbes to cause more damage: “When the chemical composition (pH, pathological sweat secretion) of host epidermis is disrupted, Malassezia spp. gains in pathogenicity and releases…
