The definition of insanity in skincare
The skin care industry has long built its strategy around roughly the same thought. Clean/peel the skin from "dirt" and its natural oils, then add substances to replace what we just washed away. Use substances and treatments such as retinol, chemical peels and more to remove dead skin cells and at the same time "accelerate cell renewal".
In my opinion, this is pure madness.
The skin has developed over 1.9 million years of evolution. During this extremely long period, it has been fine-tuned and become the complex set of microbes (bacteria, viruses, fungi, etc.), skin cells, sebaceous glands, endocannabinoid system, sweat glands, etc. which today contributes to its functioning in an outstanding way.
This complex ecosystem and its interconnections are almost impossible to understand. We simply do not know how the different parts work together and what happens when we add a substance that should not naturally be present in this ecosystem.
At the same time, many of us today live in urban societies and hence a lifestyle that we are absolutely not evolutionarily built to live. This poses huge challenges to the skin but the solution is absolutely NOT to add additional aspects (read natural or synthetic substances) that the skin is not built to face.
Then what is the solution? How can we manage this new lifestyle without destroying the delicate ecosystem of the skin?
Now comes the somewhat strange answer. We don't know and probably never will know fully how to treat this system to make it work optimally. The only way we could achieve optimal skin health is to return to the lifestyle we were evolutionarily built to live - as hunter-gatherers.
What we know today with absolute certainty is that the existing way of treating the skin is completely wrong. As long as we continue to add substances to the skin that should not naturally be there, the number of cases of skin diseases and skin inflammations will increase. Year after year... Today, 85% of all teenagers have acne, around 36% of all people in Europe have sensitive or very sensitive skin and about 10% of all people have eczema.
What we can do is only add substances that naturally support the skin's natural ecosystem. Substances that are already part of this complex ecosystem. We can try to influence the skin's microbial diversity and endocannabinoid system (which forms the basis of all natural functions in the skin) with small, careful means.
Regardless of what, a huge turnaround is required in this massive industry that annually turns over SEK 4,000,000,000,000.
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