We all want our skin to stay moist, healthy, youthful, and for it to protect and repair itself. In order for skin to be healthy, your body needs to be able to produce, circulate and absorb/maintain hydration. If any one of these functions is not happening, you will not have healthy skin.
Staying hydrated through drinking plenty of water and eating the right healthy foods are part of the solution, and important, but that alone isn’t the answer. Neither is slathering on copious amounts of moisturizer.
If the body is still unable to produce, circulate, and absorb/maintain hydration to the skin, your skin health won’t improve until the body can function properly in all aspects. That’s why skin health and skin hydration is always both an inside and an outside job. This is especially true in skin conditions such as eczema and TSW where skin hydration, along with the inflammation and recovery response, are pushed far off balance.
Protecting Skin from the Outside
Skin is exposed to the environment, so it can lose its natural moisture to the drying effect of air, sun, heat, and chemicals. Luckily, your skin has built-in moisture-locking protection. Your stratum corneum, the outermost layer of your skin, is a barrier made from dead skin cells and lipids that protects against moisture loss. But sometimes this barrier is either damaged or overwhelmed.
Most moisturizing products help protect or reinforce this barrier. This includes cleansing products that are gentle, not stripping the barrier, or products that reinforce the barrier with sunscreen, and/or a layer of natural oils or waxes to lock cellular moisture in.
Another class of products, humectants, come closer to actually hydrating your skin. They pull moisture from the air or surface of the skin, or moisture from the deeper layers of skin below, into the outermost barrier layer of skin, giving it a moist and dewy appearance. (If you want to add a hydrating humectant to your skincare lineup, choose products with hyaluronic acid, alpha hydroxy acids, urea, glycerin, glycerol, or aloe.)
What the Skin Absorbs
Protecting the skin barrier is only part of the equation. Products we use on our skin, either to cleanse, moisturize or treat trouble areas, often contain ingredients that we want to penetrate the skin, and why we bought the product to begin with. After all, helpful agents in topical treatments, moisturizers, and medicines need to be able to reach deeper than the protective barrier layer in order to do their work.
When something is able to penetrate the skin, it means this product can pass through the outer protective barrier layer into the deeper skin layers below — the epidermis and the dermis. That means it comes in contact with your living skin cells. But penetration is also why some ingredients may be problematic. Cosmetics or skincare products can contain toxins or allergens that can be harmful to those cells, or trigger immune reactions resulting in flare-ups of conditions like eczema or TSW.
Absorption means a substance not only penetrates into the deeper layers of skin, but can also enter into the bloodstream and potentially affect your entire health profile. Your living skin tissue is fed by and in contact with your bloodstream. This is why you need to treat all skincare products with the understanding that any chemicals they contain could potentially reach your entire body, including your internal organs, due to skin absorption.
That’s why choosing the most natural skin products with no artificial colors or fragrances, and wearing gloves when coming into contact with household cleaning products, are good policies to prevent the skin from absorbing toxins and sending them straight into your bloodstream.
The skin’s contact with the bloodstream works both ways: what you ingest through diet or medications can also reach the skin cells and cause a reaction. That’s why certain foods can trigger a flare-up of acne, or an immune response like eczema, psoriasis, or TSW. This means you could be eating or drinking something you think may be healthy and even hydrating – like milk or orange juice. But if milk or orange juice is an allergen or a systemic irritant for you, it could trigger inflammation in your skin cells instead, blocking true hydration and kicking off a cascade of flare-up symptoms.
Production
When you are youthful and in a state of good health, your skin can produce most of what it needs to hydrate, sustain and repair itself under the right conditions. For example, most healthy skin produces melanin to protect itself from moderate exposure to sunlight. Skin can also produce its own protective layer of lipids or oils in the form of sebum to keep itself supple and moist. Your immune system and a healthy inflammation response also helps the skin keep infections from breaching through to your bloodstream through small cuts or abrasions.
Yet genetics, poor health, poor diet, poor hydration, or an imbalance in the body’s internal systems can either overstimulate or slow down the skin’s production of melanin, oils, immune defenses, new cells, or collagen. That’s when trouble starts. Too much sebum, skin cell production that’s too fast or too slow, or producing too strong or too weak of an inflammatory or immune response, can all cause serious skin conditions.
Internal Balance Helps Maintain Natural Skin Health
When skin is underproducing or overproducing what it needs to stay healthy, or has trouble maintaining hydration or repairing itself, the best course of action is to consult with a professional to get to the root cause. While it may be possible to manage uncomfortable symptoms temporarily with drugs, only by getting to the root cause and restoring balance will you be able to build back those natural hydration, repair, and defense mechanisms that allow your skin to truly return to and maintain its natural health.
That’s why herbal medicine excels at rebalancing skin. It treats the root cause, bringing the whole body into balance so that the skin gets what it needs to maintain and repair itself. It can identify what is blocking your skin from getting what it needs, what is stalling or sidetracking the circulation of hydration in your body, and what is causing an overreaction in your immune system or inflammatory response to trigger a flareup.
Partnering with Your Skin’s Natural Capabilities
What’s important to know is that your skin is working hard, doing its best to maintain itself and its own health. Sometimes it just gets the wrong signals or lacks what it needs to stay on the right track. The right dermatology professional will partner with you so that you can partner with your skin to help give it the right environment and support it needs to stay hydrated, balanced, and healthy.
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About the Author
Olivia Hsu Friedman, LAc, Dipl.OM, DACM, Cert. TCMDerm, is the owner of Amethyst Holistic Skin Solutions and treats Acne, Eczema, Psoriasis, and TSW. Olivia treats patients via video conferencing using only herbal medicine. Olivia is Chair of the Board of Directors of the American Society of Acupuncturists, serves on the Advisory Board of LearnSkin, and is a faculty member of the Chicago Integrative Eczema Group sponsored by the National Eczema Association.