The biggest problem with your topical products is that you are using them according to directions.

Topical product addiction is rampant, epidemic even, and damaging.

Are you addicted? Discontinue your products to test. If you skin becomes quickly unstable and/or noticeably dry (in a day or so) you are addicted.

Now what?

The skin is the most complicated organ you can play with. It evolved from the brain, if that gives you an idea. The brain as we all know is easily addicted, ditto the skin.

First comes tolerance, and then dependency and then inescapable weakness.

That’s the classic addiction process. Weaning away from topical addiction can take a week, or it can take months. The skin is quick to react and slow to normalize. Skin metabolism is slow, topical products tend to speed that up as the body, the skin, defends itself. The process can also accelerate aging of the skin.

If your skin is not senescent (grandma skin), you can run a second test. Apply a topical product and then immediately wipe it off. The skin will have, in those first milliseconds, already identified it as friend or foe, memorized its chemistry and reacted. The immediate reaction always is to protect the vital organs. It may be a mild ho-hum reaction or an OMG what have you done! reaction.

Active skin will be in a high state of alarm with any molecule that is charged or below approximately 750 daltons in size.

Molecule size matters in skincare, the smaller the molecule, the easier it can get down to the epidermal/dermal junction. I will make note of molecule size throughout this syllabus.

A charged particle is any molecule that has a positive or negative charge. Acids are strongly charged or weakly charged, depending on what kind of acid, but whether it is a fatty acid (weak) from olive oil or glycolic acid (strong) from a laboratory source or a fruit extract, the skin is not happy. A charged particle is a potential threat to the internal organs because it has the potential to break through the skin (go transdermal) and then go systemic and cause havoc. The skin doesn’t know you put this substance on to look gorgeous.

A charged molecule below 750 daltons in size can cause problems, sooner or later. Usually sooner. Note that I say a ‘charged’ particle which is very different from an uncharged one. Fats and oils are uncharged for the most part, glycolic acid on the other hand is highly charged.

Most biologically active molecules in skincare are about 300 daltons molecular weight. Many oral drugs are about the same size. Interesting. If the skincare ingredient is a charged particle, and low molecular weight, however, that means trouble.

Beware charged particles.

The skin will redden, itch, swell up and so on as the battle unfolds against a charged particle. Gradually tolerance sets in and with it, dependency. The skin gives up and its reactivity slows. Over time the skin looks worn out. It is very uneven in tone and texture. The dependency has weakened the skin. Then one day redness and irritation bloom and like weeds, won’t go away.

Rosacea and dermatitis are at epidemic levels among skincare product users. Charged particles, especially acids, are the primary cause.

Anyway, with dependency your skin is at a histamine threshold (as in, ready to go bananas). Add anything more to the skin, even warm water or walking outside into pollen or smelling a rose can set off your skin into a difficult visible rosacea or worse: dermatitis. The practical distinction between the two is only a matter of degree and often, time.

Dermatitis can be lethal. With nothing to counter the nonstop itching on all areas of the body, not just where a product was applied, the only relief is suicide. It happens.

People who use a lot of products on their skin are usually sub-clinically inflamed (meaning you can’t really see it) but they are a lit fuse.

Your skin is like a houseplant, the more you feed and water it, the worse it looks.

Now anyone who tells you to apply any esthetic product twice per day (other than a light, neutral cleanser) knows nothing about skin. That includes about every skincare marketer apparently and a lot of poorly informed practitioners including physicians who should know better.

It makes no sense to cleanse, add a serum, moisturize and include a sunscreen. None. Ever. That is a recipe for product addiction and serious skin weakening and premature aging. To do this twice per day is asking to be addicted. Add in an exfoliating ingredient and you are on the road to dependent, weak, prematurely aged skin. But usually much worse.

Try this: take your usual application of products in the usual amounts and place these in a ramekin. Now stir and apply to a stack of six sheets of paper. Allow to dry. How does that paper look?

Your skin won’t absorb much of any of this into eager cells, either. Instead, it has done a ton of metabolic work and wasted energy to haul away and isolate this goo in reservoirs until it can be sloughed off. It has spent a lot of metabolic money to get rid of the wonderful stuff you have paid dearly for: oils, proteins, vitamins, sugars, glycols, acids, alkalis, and phyto-chemicals (those organic botanical extracts), etc., etc. With the best of luck, the goo has sat on the tippy top surface of the skin and will go airborne with the squames.

Fortunately, most skincare product ingredients dry up at the surface and don’t go deeper. Yay.

What skincare products can do is send electro-chemical signals down to the dermal/epidermal junction and that will cause a positive or negative reaction. So even if the actual chemical doesn’t get past the guard shack, it can do good or evil. In other words, you could apply your magic serum and wipe it off and you will most likely get all of its biologic benefits without the negatives when it absorbs deeply. This insight into skin biology was developed at the University of California at San Francisco, for those interested.

The Skin Dork repeats: the skin cannot metabolize all that stuff that doesn’t dry up and float away at the surface. It takes it to those landfills discussed earlier and reservoirs it. The skin has big fat tick-like creatures who move around on intracellular tight ropes to do their job. Not kidding, these exosome workers exist in your skin. The skin spends all of its metabolic energy hiring these fat ticks to haul around your skincare product garbage to internal landfills. Once the landfill overflows, more bad things happen. ROSACEA is most common. The skin flares up and then what? Add something more to stop the flare up? Of course, always the solution. Not.

Or maybe an oral antibiotic.

The ‘studies’ though, what about the ‘studies’ that show a huge proliferation of new cells, collagen, and all that? Yes?

As in immune response, you bet. A whole bunch of new fragmented deformed and wholly undesirable cells are generated like mad to protect the vital organs. These sandbag cells quickly degrade and become part of the cellular waste landfill. This is not biology, it’s the Alamo, it’s Stalingrad. The rate of turnover in the epidermis increased exponentially. You have made an early appointment to meet grandma skin. Not awesome.

Does this make sense to you? Sound familiar?

It is not just one product, though one product can most definitely cause dependency, it is also the totality of what is going on that causes addiction, or weakening and chronic inflammation and acne and the mess that is the visual evidence of addicted skin.

And to repeat myself: when you then apply liquid makeup to hide your true self, the dependency is complete. You are an addict and in denial; you know, that old jokey river in Egypt.

So now what? You go have a ‘professional’ peel, sometimes down to within three layers of a skin graft. Bright shiny me! Then after recovery, you take a weaker version of that peel home, usually in the form of an exfoliating cleanser, use it every day and soon after, bad things happen. Skin problems just won’t go away.

But, wait, you say again. (We are going to hear this over and over, alas.) All the “studies” show I will have a huge proliferation of new cells! Plump me! The Skin Prof repeats: except the studies don’t show the quality of those cells is lousy as they mature, the protein is fragmented and while you bulk up you also weaken the skin. You succeeded only to increase the rate of turnover and prematurely age yourself. Grandma is coming to your mirror ahead of schedule.

The issue as you age is not the quantity of cells, it is the quality and how they interact. See the TRAINING MODEL to find a way forward.

By the time you are thirty years of age you have seen at least 50% of your functional skin go away, kaput, forever. Won’t come back. The skin slowly sacrifices itself over its lifespan and deconstructs itself to avoid cancer and penetration by toxicants. That’s the nature of things and when one day you noticed this, you went out to the addiction center and loaded up on ‘anti-aging’ skincare products that do – well, precisely the opposite if you follow product directions.

Cells live in an ocean (the ECM/EXTRACELLULAR MATRIX) and send signals back and forth and link up together to form chains that keep the skin world bouncing along, but then along comes a peel or an injury and the cells now link together like mad to protect the vital organs – the primary job of the skin. A mass of cells, gobs of them, pile on top of one another and a kind of micro-gristle forms to protect the body from invasion. Plump indeed.

The Skin Dork repeats: the skin doesn’t know you want to look gorgeous. It just deals with your crazy topical stuff; like, whatever.

This over cross-linked melange is a direct result of exfoliation chemicals, scrubs, peels, and bad lasers. It is a sheer, thinning, easily sun ravaged sheet of nascent molecular scar tissue.

But you’re not done yet. More abuse is on the way. Your experimental theory of skincare is self-evident in the mirror and your practitioner now advises: “the strippings and beatings will continue until your skin improves.”

Does this sound familiar?

Next up, your local hardware store, er, skincare clinic, highly recommends an armful of products to increase skin thickness (got to get that collagen growing!) and in truth, absolute truth, slapping yourself five times per day will do the same if quantity is all you are after – and slapping doesn’t bring with it chemical dependency. The products just weaken the skin, the new ‘collagen’ disappears as fast as it arrives. Cell signaling is in chaos. Be slap happy if you are into self-abuse; it’s far better than chemical addiction by topical products.

The skin is irritated, weak, drab, lifeless and in the hands of an industry and not you.

Addiction is a very profitable practice for everyone but the addicted.

What the Skin Dork just described has a name. It is called the REPAIR MODEL in skincare. It isn’t taught under that name in esthetician schools, but it is the dominant practice in the skincare industry and has been since the mid-1980’s when the concept was published in dermatology journals. This was before much was known about skin cell biology, it must be said in defense of the notion at that time, but which not everyone accepted even then. It is an indefensible practice now.

The REPAIR MODEL seeks to induce micro injury and thereby generate a repair process that yields more skin protein. In practice it yields a skin stiffening formica look that accelerates skin aging. It is wrong at its very core assumption: cell quality not protein quantity provides a youthful looking skin. Injury, especially chronic induced injury, leads to inflammation and worse.

The REPAIR MODEL is the dominant practice in applied skincare today. It is without a biologic rationale. In skin esthetics cell signaling is harmed by micro injury (and more so from macro injury as caused by exfoliation). Chronic micro injury always brings visible damage to the surface. The Repair Model is, in practice today, an economic model, nothing more.

There are ways to look and feel your best. You won’t get there being an addict or shredding yourself into raw meat.

The TRAINING MODEL in skincare is how you should go about looking young. Like cardio and other exercise, you optimize your metabolism, optimize your muscle tone, and how you look and feel. With skin, you do the same.

Great skin is not expensive, addicting or difficult to get and keep. Not all grandmas have grandma skin or ever will because they paid attention to what their skin told them.