Did you know that the pH of your skin can determine how healthy, glowing and vibrant it is? Thats because the skin's pH plays a key role in maintaining a healthy and strong lipid barrier, providing a thriving environment for your skin's microbiome and immune system.
In the health and wellness community, we are encouraged to keep our bodies alkaline to avoid chronic inflammatory conditions and disease. However, our skin should NOT be alkaline. In fact, healthy skin should have a pH of around 4.5 - 5.5. A neutral pH is 7; so anything below that is considered an ACIDIC environment and anything above it is termed ALKALINE.
The acidic nature of our skin helps healthy bacteria thrive while also providing antimicrobial protection, as it has been found that certain pathogenic bacteria thrive under alkaline conditions. Thus an overly alkaline environment for your skin’s surface would disrupt the bacteria that live there and make you susceptible to opportunistic organisms. It should be noted that a highly acidic environment can also have undesired consequences like dehydration and inflammation. Your skin cells and friendly microbiota work together to keep your pH in an optimal range.
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Our skin provides a protective shield from harmful pathogens and environmental toxins but is also a living, breathing, massive ecosystem, home to billions of organisms including bacteria, virus, fungi and even mites. Some of these organisms are beneficial bacteria and play a very important role in maintaining a healthy skin barrier. As we've learned, the integrity our lipid barrier is one of the main factors in maintaining healthy, high vibrational skin. If our skin immunity is constantly being activated, our ability to create new and healthy cells becomes impaired resulting in skin issues and premature aging.
Just like our gut flora uses chemical signals to communicate with our intestinal immune system, our skin's immune system is being informed, activated and deactivated by the different bacteria living there.1
Your skin's microbiome is considered a "lipidome" where organisms thrive in a fatty or lipid rich environment, whereas your beneficial gut flora prefer fiber rich food sources.
Depending on whether you were born vaginally or via C-section, you were exposed to a variety of bacteria that colonized both your gut and your skin. Every one of us has a unique and vastly diverse ecosystem of organisms that fluctuates throughout our entire life. So what we were initially born with is different from our teenage years and as an adult. This is one of the reasons why our skin issues can vary based on our age.2
Certain surfactants (the cleansing agents in cleansers), highly astringent daily toners, and even normal tap water, influences the skin surface. The extreme increase or decrease of the skin pH irritates and breaks down the lipid barrier, disrupts your skin microbiome making you susceptible to TEWL (think dehydrated, dry scaly skin), bacterial infections, premature aging even skin cancer.⠀
Other factors contributing to an imbalanced pH:
Scrubbing or over-washing
Using soaps
Over sun exposure
Not using moisturizer
Chemicals such as phlates, parabens, Petroleum, harsh presevatives
Leaky Gut
Inflammatory Diet
Recognizing and avoiding factors that alter skin pH, eating a nutrient rich diet, selecting products that preserve the lipid barrier are all ways you can continue to cultivate skin that thrives!
A healthy lipid barrier is truly the key to the kingdom when it comes to thriving skin.