Once applied, does it sit on top of your skin? Does it “sink into your pores,” as the beauty bloggers say? And then what — does it pool at the bottom of the pore? Does any actually make it to your blood?
Photo: Pablo Croatto/Westend61/Getty Images Perhaps you’ve come across this oft-cited statistic: 60 percent of skin care absorbs into your bloodstream. Hard data says otherwise — there’s no way to quantify exactly how much skin care gets “soaked” up by your blood. There is not, in fact, a cocktail of vital fluids and vitamin C serum coursing through your veins as we speak.
The stratum corneum has lots of microscopic moving parts: the microbiome, the acid mantle, the lipid barrier, a layer of dead skin cells sometimes compared to a brick wall. They come together to form a waxy, water-repellent shield of fatty acids, sebum, and ceramides, which seals the skin’s natural moisture in and keeps external moisture out. This is a good thing; it’s why you can luxuriate in the occasional bath and still lead a long, non-waterlogged life.
That’s not to say some of these non-penetrative ingredients aren’t lovely. “They can seal the skin and give a hydrating effect, and when you do that, then everything happening underneath is very happy,” explains Dr. Altman. The whole point of skin care, really, is to nourish the skin barrier. Once that’s good, the skin’s “normal regenerative processes take over,” the chemist says. It self-moisturizes , self-exfoliates , self-protects , and self-heals.
Even ingredients that naturally occur within the skin are destined for a surface-level existence. Collagen protein, for example, lives in the dermis, a lower layer of the skin — but topical versions can’t magically woosh down to the dermis. “Protein that is larger than 50 kilodaltons has no chance of ever penetrating the skin,” Dr. Altman says. The same goes for hyaluronic acid, or HA, another natural dermis-dweller.
Finally, there are the beauty ingredients that beat all the odds; that infiltrate both the circulatory and lymphatic systems. Other blood-surfing skin-care ingredients include retinol , sodium lauryl sulphate , and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons . A study from 2009 found over 200 additional chemicals in infants’ umbilical cord blood, some from beauty products presumably worn by their mothers.
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