WE DON’T WANT TO ALARM YOU, BUT THERE’S AN ENTIRE COMMUNITY OF MICROORGANISMS LIVING IT UP ON YOUR SKIN. KEEP THEM ALL HAPPY AND HEALTHY—AND YOU WILL BE, TOO. HERE’S WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW.
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The next time you wash your hands or scrub your scalp, think about how that affects the microorganisms hustling and bustling about on your skin. The human body contains trillions of these microbes, all of them invisible to the naked eye. But researchers are increasingly finding that how these microscopic elements benefit us is very apparent. Over the past decade interest in our microbiome—the vast community of microorganisms that include bacteria, viruses, and fungi teeming in and on our bodies—has surged, and for good reason.
3. GREAT EQUALIZERS
1. THE LANDMARK STUDY In 2008, the National Institutes of Health organized a consortium of scientists for its Human Microbiome Project (HMP). The national initiative was tasked with mapping the normal microbial makeup of healthy adults. Four years later they revealed groundbreaking findings, including that that each person’s microbiota is unique. What’s more, the species and numbers of microorganisms found in our one-of-a-kind ecosystem affects innumerable aspects of our health. And in turn, what we eat, where we live, our genetics, and even the kind of moisturizer we use impacts the diversity of our microbiome. “The evolving concept is that we’re all one big super organism,” says Adam Friedman, a professor of dermatology at the George Washington University School of Medicine & Health Sciences. “When you have all the right
organisms in the right numbers, everything goes smoothly. Disease emerges when you have a decrease in microbial diversity.” The good news, notes Friedman, is that there are myriad ways to maintain a healthy microbiota. Many of these start with the right skincare treatments. The big one? Continue slathering on the daily sunscreen. Ultraviolet radiation kills bacteria, so that day at the beach with no sun protection could have wiped out a lot of beneficial bugs. Skipping the harsh antimicrobial soaps is also good practice. Use mild soaps without surfactants that are labeled “gentle” or designed for sensitive skin or for eczema. And avoid products that contain sodium lauryl sulfate, which knocks out a lot of bacteria. In other words, Friedman says, do “all of the things that dermatologists have been preaching.”
2. UNDER MY SKIN In a way, our skin is the canary in the coal mine. In “The Beauty of Dirty Skin: The Surprising Science of Looking and Feeling Radiant from the Inside Out,” author and New York City dermatologist Dr. Whitney Bowe reports that common skin issues, including rosacea, psoriasis and eczema, are connected to what we eat. “The trillions of microbes covering our skin’s surface, and diving into the deeper layers of our skin, are essential to our skin’s health—they communicate with our immune system,” she says.
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4. A DIRTY LITTLE SECRET
Surface treatments can bring your microbiome back into balance—or throw it out of whack. That’s why it’s so important to understand what you’re putting on your skin. For instance, thermal spring water is the basis for many of the products made by the famed French dermatology lab, La Roche-Posay. The natural water acts as a prebiotic, helping to maintain healthy strains of bacteria. Bifidobacterium longum, a beneficial strain, improves the skin barrier and can be found in the Lancôme Advanced Génifique Youth Activating Concentrate Serum. The oats in Aveeno Eczema Therapy Moisturizing Cream act as a protectant, improving skin’s pH, and the Marie Veronique Pre + Probiotic Daily Mist claims to include 34 different kinds of probiotics, in addition to prebiotics and postbiotics.
We already know that probiotics (live bacteria) and prebiotics (the nutritional support for probiotics) can be beneficial. Consuming foods with probiotics (found in yogurt, dark chocolate, kombucha and apple cider vinegar) can help to keep our immune systems in check, regulate our circadian rhythms, and prevent infections, among other benefits. But not all probiotics are created equal, and each specific strain has a different purpose. The bacteria Lactobacillus lives naturally in and on us, and it’s also found in fermented foods like yogurt. But there are multiple strains of Lactobacillus, and most are vulnerable to heat, so refrigeration is necessary to keep the helpful bacteria alive.
Consumers should always be savvy when it comes to using such products. Many consumer products aren’t required to be approved by the Food and Drug Administration approval before hitting the market. And “probiotic” and “prebiotic” aren’t well-defined terms set by the FDA, so figuring out which products contain beneficial (or even actually alive) bacteria lands in the lap of the consumer. When starting any new health or skincare regimen, it can’t hurt to consult with your dermatologist and physician. “Probiotic skincare products that are currently on the market range dramatically in the sophistication of the science backing their claims,” says Bowe. “It’s very overwhelming for the consumer to know what they’re getting.”
Another popular probiotic mist chock full of bacteria is the AO+ Mist by Mother Dirt. Its beneficial bug is Nitrosomonas eutropha, an ammonia-oxidizing bacteria (AOB) commonly found in untreated soil. The mist was created by AOBiome, a Bostonbased biotechnology company founded in 2013, after chemist David Whitlock was challenged by a woman he was dating to figure out why her horses rolled in the dirt every March, like clockwork. A quick guess–insects–was dismissed, as they weren’t a problem that time of year. And plenty of animals, including dogs, cats, birds, often roll in the dirt. He wanted to know why. “I was trying to impress her,” Whitlock says, so he dug into research and found that by getting dirty, the horses were also adding this specific bacteria, N. eutropha, to their skin. These crucial bacteria feed off the ammonia and urea created by sweat and converts it to nitrite and nitric oxide, helping to reduce skin irritations and itchiness. It was helping to keep everything in balance, acting as a peacekeeper. “If horses needed to get those bacteria on their skin to deal with the ammonia from sweat, that’s an important physiologic thing,” Whitlock says. He hypothesized that humans once lived with N. eutropha on our skin, too, but our obsession with being clean by using soaps, shampoos and antibacterial products cleared it from our flora. So he cultivated the strain and started spritzing it on himself as an experiment. His initial findings were encouraging and it prompted the company to lead a small study that asked about 30 people to abandon all of their personal care products, take water-only showers and use the AO+ Mist twice a day. Test subjects were swabbed weekly to evaluate how the N. eutropha affected the skin. One user, Julia Scott, wrote about her experience in a widely shared New York Times story in 2014. Scott reported that in using the mist, her skin became “softer and smoother, rather than dry and flaky.” She also noted that her complexion, typically prone to hormone-related breakouts, had cleared and her pores seemed to shrink. “My skin began to change for the better,” she wrote.
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5. THE WORD GETS OUT After the article was published, consumer curiosity exploded. “It brought such an intense amount of interest into our research and the work that we were doing that it really made us think differently about how ready the public is to have this conversation,” says Jasmina Aganovic, president of Mother Dirt, the cosmetic brand created by AOBiome to market products that answered that demand. In 2015, it launched the AO+ Mist along with a body and face foaming cleaner and a shampoo. Today, a moisturizer rounds out the product line. The complimentary products don’t contain live bacteria but were formulated to work with the mist to “enable a healthy biome.” Aganovic says that users of the products have noticed that, over time, their skin starts to improve and they have been able to remove products from their daily skincare routine. “They might not need to use as much moisturizer, they might not need to use as much makeup, they might not need to use as much deodorant and so on and so forth because their skin is now rebalancing as a result of its skin microbiome and it’s better able to take care of itself,” she says. The AO+ Mist looks just like water, but it’s full of cultivated N. eutropha, along with disodium phosphate (a food additive) and magnesium chloride (natural salts). It’s recommended that users keep the spray in the refrigerator to keep the bacteria alive. Twice a day, spray on sweat-prone areas, especially the face and under arms, and Mother Dirt claims it “consumes the irritating parts of sweat and converts it into beneficial things for the skin.” “Believe it or not, this bacteria, because it’s so ubiquitously present in nature, it already has an established reputation as keeping things in check and keeping things in balance,” Aganovic says. “So when you apply that same principle to the skin, and especially when you see how the skin ecosystem starts to evolve with the reintroduction of the peacekeeper, it really reinforces its reputation by keeping the balance.”
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6. MORE GOOD NEWS In addition, Mother Dirt reports that by using its products, users might see an improvement in skin appearance and skin clarity. And 60% were able to cut back on deodorant use. In online reviews, its users have reported that the mist improves rosacea, reduces skin redness, shrinks pores, knocks out underarm odor, and clears up acne. Whitlock believes the AO+ Mist has untapped potential: “I think if every person started using AO+, the world would be a very different place.” And indeed, AOBiome, which has recently spun off Mother Dirt, continues to break new ground. On its public pipeline page, it indicates varying stages of clinical research using the same
bacteria in its AO+ Mist. Jim Hoffman, senior vice president of strategic alliances and communications at AOBiome, points out that N. eutropha could possibly benefit more than just skin, adding that the company is working on research into alleviating allergic rhinitis, hypertension, and even migraines. “It’s mind-blowing,” he says. Aganovic is equally optimistic: “In the future, we might see doctors prescribing different strains of live bacteria for the treatment of actual diseases. There’s still a ton of work to be done and the science still has a long way to go, but there’s certainly a lot of excitement that I think is warranted.”