Lipids in the life of your skin
Oils have become an object of advertising hype in skincare, just like other ingredients. This would not matter much except that different oils can have different effects on your skin.
How to choose a good oil for your skin?
- Think about nourishing your skin and NOT the acne bacteria.
- Are you looking to alleviate a skin condition like eczema?
- What matters to your skin is the fatty acid composition and NOT how pretty the name of the plant might be.
- An oil may contain some beneficial impurities, but some impurities may impart a strong odor. I prefer to use purified oils and add extras as needed.
- You will be using minute amounts of oil; choose the type according to your skin needs and not the price.
- Some oils, like palm oil, may have a high environmental cost; try to avoid them.
- Some ω-6 polyunsaturated fatty acids, and their incorporation into membrane phospholipids may favor inflammation. Other fatty acids, such as ω-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids, may decrease inflammation. Right now, this is “theory”, more evidence is needed before we take this factor into account for formulation.
Special oils for special jobs
Massage stretch marks with rosehip oil, which by itself will help at prevention and at healing them and has the advantage that you can use it without any worries during pregnancy and lactation.
Taking care of your skin can also help you feel (and get) better sooner. If you take a relaxing bath, apply some rosehip oil afterward so that your skin does not get dry. The skin will feel more comfortable, and you will heal better.
It’s a mystery to me why coconut oil became a fad, it contains lots of highly saturated fatty acids, so the acne bacteria love it! Taken orally, it is also very bad for your health; it increases LDL cholesterol, and it’s an established cause of atherosclerosis and cardiovascular events.
Silicones: skincare products containing silicones are often called “oil-free.” They are oil-free in the sense that the skin can’t use silicones, an advantage if you don’t want to feed that acne bacteria, but at the same time, these polymers of siloxane will not provide nutrition to the skin or scalp.
Plant names (common and their Latin counterparts), chemicals with fancy names like astaxanthin, and others are even more challenging to pronounce, like docosahexaenoic acid. Still, ingredient lists are anything BUT boring. Good or bad, the ingredients lists are a chemical catalog of what you apply to your skin.
Lipids in life
You may think of fats like something to avoid, especially if you are overweight, but lipids are not only unavoidable but also crucial for life. Various lipids are an integral part of cell membranes; they are partly responsible for the permeability properties that make every membrane in our cells able to function properly, allowing some stuff to come in, keeping other stuff out, and allowing some chemicals to come in, and out as required by the cell to continue to live.
We need lipids, including essential fatty acids, for our cells to function properly. During evolution, we humans (actually, vertebrates in general) lost some enzymes on the way, including some fatty acid desaturases, enzymes that remove two hydrogen atoms from a saturated fatty acid, creating a double bond. For example, we can’t convert oleic acid into linoleic acid and α-linolenic acid, both of these polyunsaturated fatty acids that are essential for development. This changes the spatial arrangement of the fatty acid. It also changes its physical properties and the behavior of the membrane where that fatty acid is inserted, including how it responds to temperature changes.
When you look at an ingredient list, there is nothing wrong with “fillers”, as we call the ingredients that have no apparent biochemical activity on our skin cells. However, we need those ingredients to dissolve actives, protect actives from the action of bacteria and mold, make the product pleasant (you would not use a non-pleasant product), etc. It just happens that oils do not need any non-active ingredient to be able to do their job. Without water, there will be no bacterial or fungal growth, so you don’t need preservatives. You don’t need a fragrance (if you want a fragrance, you can use a perfume you like, assuming you have no allergy problems).
A good oil based serum essential for all skin types, especially those with dry skin, to soothe and moisturize. It will also help eliminate rough patches of skin affected by psoriasis. This serum contains the lipids all skin needs to maintain a healthy barrier against the environment. The objective of this every lipid serum (not literally every lipid, but close enough) is to provide an array of nutrients and antioxidants that your skin needs to stay healthy.
What else is in a good lipid-base serum? I would add derivatives of cholesterol, another crucial component of cell membranes; phytosterols (also lipids), phosphatidyl choline (in lecithin) . Tocopherol and other lipophilic antioxidants prevent lipid peroxidation in cellular membranes and peroxidation of other lipids, including those we use as energy for our mitochondria to use to produce ATP and reducing power that will be used in making everything else our cells require.
References
Raphael, W., & Sordillo, L. M. (2013). Dietary polyunsaturated fatty acids and inflammation: the role of phospholipid biosynthesis. International journal of molecular sciences, 14(10), 21167–21188. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijms141021167
Ito, H., Asmussen, S., Traber, D. L., Cox, R. A., Hawkins, H. K., Connelly, R., … Enkhbaatar, P. (2014). Healing efficacy of sea buckthorn (Hippophae rhamnoides L.) seed oil in an ovine burn wound model. Burns, 40(3), 511–519. doi:10.1016/j.burns.2013.08.011
Fritsche KL. The science of fatty acids and inflammation. Adv Nutr. 2015 May 15;6(3):293S-301S. doi: 10.3945/an.114.006940. PMID: 25979502; PMCID: PMC4424767.
DISCLAIMER: These claims have not been evaluated by the FDA and are not intended to diagnose, cure, treat, or prevent any disease.