Clean: The New Science of Skin

[E]ven our most personal decisions about caring for our bodies have long been influenced and manipulated by larger power structures.

Capitalism sells nothing so effectively as status.

We all temporarily inhabit a planet of microbes, and we are guests here. Eventually they will have the planet to themselves again. They have been around before us and will persist long after us. The question is not how to fit them into our worlds, but how we can fit into theirs.

As we change our worlds, we change our bodies. The old duality between environmental health and human health is obsolete.

Self and other is less of a dichotomy than a continuum.

Finland does have some nature-oriented day cares—and they are not just about drawing trees and having the children read Emerson. “They spend their whole day outdoors,” says Lehtimäki. “Even when it’s winter—it can be minus twenty-five [Celsius] and so cold.” Parents are advised to dress their children in many layers, according to Finnish news coverage of one such day care. It also suggests that the three- to five-year-olds are made to run around if they complain: “If children feel cold, the adults activate them.” During fall and spring, they have “tent weeks” when they sleep outside in the forest.

The best advice right now is to think of hygiene as similar to medicine—extremely important in some scenarios, and also very possible to overdo.

Health means different things to different people, but it’s always associated with a certain level of freedom—especially financial and temporal—that allows people to live well, and to focus on relationships and meaningful work.

When we clean ourselves, we at least temporarily alter the microscopic populations—either by removing them or by altering the resources available to them. Even if we do not use cleaning products that specifically say they are “antimicrobial,” any chemistry applied to the skin will have some effect on the environment in which the microbes grow. Soaps and astringents meant to make us drier and less oily also remove the sebum on which microbes feed. Because scientists and doctors didn’t have the technology to fully understand the number or importance of these microbes until recently, very little is known about what exactly they’re doing there. But as this new research elucidates the interplay of microbes and skin, it is challenging long-held beliefs about what is good and bad.

He explains that if you really wanted to kill all the bacteria on your countertop, you’d have to leave a disinfectant (like Clorox) in contact with the surface for ten minutes. The product isn’t “killing 99.9% of germs” in the way that anyone actually uses it—a quick wipe-down. This was, both in concept and in practice, misguided. And the magnitude of its effects on our lives is now starting to become clear. •

Once you start hearing about all the things people do and don’t do, use and don’t use, couldn’t live with or without, standards of normalcy fade. Then you can focus on what actually matters to you.

There are more microbial cells in and on each of us than human cells. While

Many species are common to the vaginal and gut biomes, and the degree to which they each contribute to populating an infant is unclear. but both are known to change during pregnancy, and it is clear that they serve as a sort of inoculation right at birth. The presence of

Manhattan's middle and upper classes began to wash in their bedrooms. Even in impoverished tenements, families brought out a basin once a week filled it with water to bathe the children on the kitchen floor.

Every microbiologist I spoke with agreed that antibiotic overuse is likely a bigger contributor to messing up our microbiomes—gut and skin—than hygiene itself.

When the predators in the dinosaur park start killing one another, you’ve got a hit movie on your hands. When the immune system starts attacking the self, you get autoimmune diseases.

Public-health advocates are pressuring the FDA to ban parabens in products sold in the U.S. The European Union did this in 2012—but the economic influence of industry on regulation in American politics makes this unlikely.

At the time, the compound was already known to have links to allergies in children and to hormone-signaling disruption that appeared to play a role in breast cancer, thyroid functioning, and weight gain.

the provisions in the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act . . . have not been updated since it was first enacted in 1938.