What does a skin therapist really want you to know? And I don't mean what does a content creator want you to know. I mean a skin therapist, who is practicing in the treatment rooms every day for decades. That's me, by the way.
The first thing I would like you to know is 'your cleanse isn't as good as it could be.'
Wait - I'm not about to sell you extra cleansing tools.
Cleansing is a delicate task.
Let me explain it from the beginning...
Lesson one: what are we cleansing anyway?
I want you to imagine a fine veil over your entire body. It's invisible, it's powerful. We call this veil 'the Acid Mantle'.
You'll hear it referred to in the skin world as many things: the barrier, the biome, lots of different terms.
The most important thing to know is that it is the first line of immunity for your entire body.
Your body is a delicious soup of nutrition and an ideal host environment for all kinds of bacteria, parasites, diseases, viruses.... all of who would love to come in and colonise your nutritious body.
To stop this happening your body has evolved over millennia to secrete things that can kill invaders: you secrete sweat, skin sebum (oil), tears, saliva, vaginal mucous...
All these fluids are naturally acidic, and deadly to many would-be invaders. Not all, but many, will not make it past the acidic Acid Mantle.
Things that float around in the air get trapped in the Acid Mantle, it acts as a shield that stops things physically passing the border of the skin. If you think about pollen or traffic dust, you really don't want those things getting IN. Fortunately they mostly don't, if the acid mantle is intact and present.
So the most important thing you can do is retain the acidic nature of your skin.
Where most of you go wrong, is you think this means 'apply acids' or 'use AHA cleanser'.
Not only is that NOT the way to get your skin acidity right, but it's important to understand that there is nothing on this earth you can apply, which is better than what you already make.
Comparing 'naturally secreted acid mantle' to 'product that I apply to mimic acid mantle' is like comparing breast milk to formula: yes, it will work. But if we have the option, the breast milk is always going to be a superior substance simply because it self-adjusts. The acid mantle is superior to anything you can apply, because it self-adjusts to its environment.
So why cleanse it away at all?
Well if we lived in a utopia of clean air in an ancient forest, we probably would never need to cleanse.
But we live in an industrialised world, full of air pollution, pollen, smoke, traffic, factory fumes... and we apply things to our faces all the time, which most of us cannot or won't stop doing.
A great example of this is sunscreen. Because of climate change, there is a literal hole in the ozone layer of Earth. This layer is supposed to filter out cancer-causing UV rays. With the hole being there, we are more exposed to UV than we should be in some countries. NZ has the worst exposure due to the hole, Australia is a close second.
It would be very ill-advised to avoid sunscreen. Every skincare aficionado knows SPF is the number one way to protect skin longevity and avoid skin cancer.
But sunscreen is of course going to disrupt the natural state of the Acid Mantle. It's adding to it, mixing with it, and then it must be washed off again. You can't just leave it on or skin suffers congestion, and serums can't penetrate.
So we find ourselves with the need to cleanse.
Another great example is makeup.
For many years skin therapists incorrectly advised people to 'avoid makeup if you want good skin'. This is utter nonsense in my view. Makeup puts a protective, often reflective, layer on the skin that physically stops things in the air around you from touching your face. Modern makeups are usually sun protective.
So long as the formulation is designed with a skin-health-first approach, you will always have more benefit from using it than not. If you aren't sure if you're on such a makeup, ask your qualified skin therapist. The ones we work with here at Natashas are definitely good for your skin and very protective.
However - they create the need to cleanse.
So we find ourselves with this need to cleanse, no matter what we do. It's true for everyone. As soon as the Acid Mantle starts to thicken up with more sebum around adolescence, a cleanser is a MUST for skin health in a modern world.
If you plan to move away from the city, live in Tibet and raise goats, I will give you permission to forgo cleanser. But only if you promise to wash your face with goat milk yoghurt.... see, even then I want you to cleanse.
Cleansing creates the majority of skin problems we see. Let us explain.
The Acid Mantle is made mostly of oil. Some people don't have a lot of that to begin with, it's genetically determined. Life changes it a little, but overall it's a genetic lottery how much you make.
Things are trapped IN that oil. To get clean, we have to remove at least some of your oil, taking the impurities with it.
The problem we face is oil naturally repels water. To get water to mix with it, we only have a few options:
- Like dissolves like. If we use a mix of oils that are SIMILAR to skin oil composition, we can melt it and move it off using a manual wiping with a face cloth.
- Surfactant breaks surface tension. If we want to use a non-oil based cleanser, we need a chemical that breaks the repellant nature of the oil and lets the water 'wet' it. There are surfactants available that are safe for the skin and cause no harm. There are others which seriously damage underlying skin cells, and a whole spectrum in between. The determining factors are type of surfactant, and intensity it's used at. The worlds most common surfactants come to the skincare manufacturer in big barrels of dry flakes, and are so, so brutal on skin in their raw form that if you put your hands into it, your skin would immediately be burned. The same ingredient used at a low concentration just makes your gentle cleanser foam nicely. However...
There's an unintended consequence of surfactants that we want you to be aware of.
Because they are good at what they do, they can cause TOO MUCH removal of your acid mantle. Many, many cleansers fall into this category.
This is why everyone needs a cleanser customised to their own skin. What is suitable for one, could be absolutely tragic for another, simply because of the persons own natural oil flow, the health of the underlying skin, and the combination of surfactants used.
Most clients I meet are using a cleanser that is totally inappropriate for their skin.
The first thing I do for most people is change them to the right cleanser, or custom-blend a cleanser for them.
It's not sexy, it's not usually what people come in asking for, but it makes the biggest difference.
So what happens if you use the wrong cleanser?
You won't always know it's the wrong cleanser. We see lots of people who have quite nice skin, but the cleanser is wrong.
Sometimes we are talking about a skin that is dry, raw, sensitised. Sometimes skin responds to the wrong cleanser by making too much replacement oil, trapping you in a cycle of sebum hell.
But quite often your skin is fine. It's just that there's massive lost potential.
It will be fine...until it isn't.
Here's one of those quotes my clients love to give me at the first consultation, that tells me their skincare has been slowly eroding their skin health for years....
"I always had good skin before, I don't know why it's like this now."
It seems easier for people to decide there's some deep, underlying, complex reason for their skin condition, than it does for them to accept that they're simply not qualified to choose their own cleanser.
After all cleanser is available everywhere, right?
And you can read blogs, reviews and watch content about what cleanser is the best.
Well, if that was true, dear reader I would be out of a job.
I would love to see people STOP going on fasts, elimation diets, gut health resets, supplements... and first, come to a skin therapist for the right cleanser and skincare routine.
Too often people spend a lot of money seeking out a mysterious, deep complex 'reason' when in fact, the reason is so basic it bores you.
You just need to stop cleansing incorrectly, learn which cleanser is right for you, possibly have it customised, and then apply products that will rebuild the Acid Mantle to its former state.
You will need someone to assess the skin properly and then customise for you. We do that.
Part 2 coming soon: How temperature affects your skin.