Key insights from
Clean: The New Science of Skin
What you'll learn
It might sound counterintuitive to take a sabbatical from showering to refresh your skin, but recent studies prove that a bathroom full of skincare products might not improve your bodily health at all—in fact, all of those moisturizers, conditioners, and wrinkle creams might be feeding the problems you’ve been trying to eliminate. Despite the health and skincare industry’s advertisement of various products as wellness necessities, their claims aren’t always scientifically sound and their creations may be corrupting the skin’s “microbiome”—a crucial layer of microbial organisms partly responsible for one’s overall wellness. Writer and physician James Hamblin deconstructs society’s increasingly expensive reliance upon skincare products to reveal a more nuanced understanding of hygiene, skin, and overall human wellbeing.
Key insights
- • What you'll learn
- 1 You are made of microbes. But you still might want to hold off on that second shower.
- 2 As disease spread throughout the 19th century, the notion of “hygiene” expanded, too.
- 3 The modern face cream might be a money-making mask—many skincare products are more about prestige than wellness.
- 4 Allergies aren’t simply natural phenomena—they’re often complicated consequences of unnatural environments and products.
- 5 A little bacteria won’t kill you—the world of probiotics shows great medical promise.
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