Is Your Skin Care Self-Care?
Self-care is “the practice of taking action to preserve or improve one's own health”.
Skin care is often marketed as self-care, especially when it is “dermatologist approved”. (Approved? How? Which dermatologist? Were they paid?) We know that ingredients matter; messaging and marketing matter, too. And if your self-care amounts to a lengthy daily ritual of using corrective skincare products that significantly change the look and feel of your skin, that’s certainly not self-care, it’s probably self-harm. Many popular and even trusted products marketed for skin care actually have about the same effect as rubbing Hot Cheetos on your face, eventually you’re going to get burned, sometimes literally.
Skincare products are rarely formulated to improve the function and health of your skin.
Instead, they’re formulated with “high-performance” ingredients that artificially and temporarily help you achieve the young, flawless, and glowing beauty “ideal” to which the entire industry and most of society subscribe. There is little or no consideration given to how these skincare products affect your health long term.
Your skin is the largest organ in your body and is filled with blood vessels and nerve endings.
Like your gut, your skin is designed to interact with your environment, it’s a selectively permeable barrier. So, just like what you eat affects your health and how you feel, what you put on your skin also affects your health and how you feel. Your skincare ingredients may not be the same as those in Hot Cheetos, but the effects on your health are probably similar.
How cosmetics, of which skincare is a subset, affect your health is particularly important if you’re a woman, because we typically use more cosmetics than men and we have worse health care than do men.
Today the medical field still doesn’t know how, how well, or even if many drugs and medical devices work for women. And, unlike drugs, skincare products do not undergo significant, lengthy testing to ascertain that they’re safe. In fact, in the US anyone can put anything in a jar and legally sell it as skincare, and they frequently do.
The skincare industry creates trends and markets to exploit, and, having created a trend, creates and markets new products to address the effects caused by the predecessor.
For example, exfoliate and thin your skin, then use voguey hyaluronic acid to artificially and temporarily plump it back up. Hyaluronic acid is part of the extracellular matrix. As with any ecosystem, perturbing the system by adding mass quantities of one particular component rarely ends well.
Many skincare products, even those marketed as “clean” (whatever that means), pointedly contain ingredients intended to affect your metabolism and your skin microbiome in precisely this fashion. And, as a matter of course, there’s the unintended side effects, but, no problem, there’s their new product line. And a whole new jar of worms.
Skincare and cosmetics manufacturers have no real incentive to spend millions of dollars conducting long-term safety research.
They do, however, have an incentive to make a profit, which they achieve by focusing their research on ingredients that produce impressive, but temporary results that keep you coming back for more. For example, using anti-aging peptides to give you the illusion of younger-looking skin. It’s temporary, at best, and you’ve got to go back and buy more. That’s the deal. Little to no thought is given to the long-term health ramifications of using these products daily, in some cases, for decades.
But, what about all that clinical testing?
Clinical testing of cosmetics usually refers to in-house studies (where the motivation is to gather data to help sell the product), that are incredibly small (30-40 people), short term (hours to weeks), and focused on subjective outcomes (the look and feel of skin as judged by the participant), to forward the manufacturers’ goal of selling anything to anybody at any cost.
Look closely; the messaging behind almost every skincare brand is centered around ageism and perfectionism.
The skincare industry spends billions promoting the beauty “ideal” of looking young and flawless, an “ideal” that is rooted in capitalism, patriarchy, and racism. The push to look “young and flawless" negates and erases diversity and natural beauty, pits you against your biology, and cultivates self-loathing and self-hatred, instead of self-esteem, self-love, and actual self-care.
The pursuit of this unattainable and toxic beauty “ideal” leads to psychological, emotional, chemical, and physical stress to your body, all of which produce abnormal physiology and injury to your cells, potentially driving the initiation and progression of autoimmune disease. Risk factors for autoimmune disease include having two X chromosomes, making estrogen, having the ability to get pregnant, and experiencing trauma. Add a daily self-care ritual of slathering yourself with substances that negatively affect your health in unknown ways, along with toxic beauty messaging encouraging you to fight your biology, and it’s no wonder women are affected by autoimmune disease more than are men.
Yet society has centered beauty around looking young and flawless so much, particularly for women, that we frequently and unknowingly impose this unattainable beauty “ideal” upon each other and younger generations in the name of well-intentioned bonding and self-care rituals.
The result is that millions of women spend tons of time, energy, and money fighting their biology and making themselves sick, when they could and should be doing something less destructive, or, better, more constructive. Women still pursue this because beauty has historically been one of the few ways we had to wield any power. But how powerful are you if you’re draining your time, money, energy, and health in a vain pursuit of an arbitrary, precarious, and unattainable beauty “ideal” that’s crippling you?
Take a survey of your skincare products.
How many of them bring you ease, comfort, delight, and joy? Do you know what’s in them and how they work to achieve the results you’re getting? Is the messaging behind your products centered around ageism and perfectionism, i.e., correcting, masking, hiding, shrinking, or blurring wrinkles, blemishes, pore size, dark spots, etc.? Does your skin improve with repeated use or are you stuck using the product the same way to achieve the same result every time? How much time, money and energy does your skin care cost? Is it worth it?
My article, “Choosing Skincare For Health” (February 23, 2023) contains these and more detailed guiding principles that I use to determine what products I’ll put on my skin.
Knowing what ingredients are in your skincare and cosmetics is important, and, remember, the messaging surrounding your skin and its care is important, too.
Ultimately what you put on your skin is your choice.
Make it an informed choice with a good return on your investment. Vote with your dollar, support brands that embrace diversity and decenter ageism and perfectionism. Buy products that provide you with skin care that truly is self-care.
