What Happens When You Exfoliate and Scrub Your Face?

When you exfoliate, you remove dead skin cells, enhancing your skin’s texture. But if those dead skin cells are part of the healthy skin barrier, is it good to exfoliate?

Why Do We Scrub Our Skin?

The idea behind scrubbing is to stimulate cell turnover by removing the skin’s top layer. This natural stimulation boosts skin renewal and texture improvement. Indeed, our skin, like everything in nature, aims for balance.

The Hayflick Phenomenon:

When we remove the topmost layer, which is the dead skin layer, the lower layer, where new cells are “born,” gets stimulated to produce more cells. But this overlooks the so-called Hayflick limit. The Hayflick phenomenon pertains to the number of times a normal human cell population will divide before the division process stops. We now understand that telomeres, the ends of DNA molecules in a cell, become shorter with each cell division. This continues until they reach a critical minimum length, halting division.

The progressive shortening of telomeres also means our skin doesn’t renew identically. Over time, our skin ages faster, becoming thinner. This results in a weakened natural skin barrier, leading to increased sensitivity over the years.

People who’ve frequently subjected their skin to peels often have parchment-like skin. It’s advisable to approach this with caution.

Salicylic Acid:

This acid is commonly found in peels and is now seen in daily-use tonics and lotions. From my perspective, this isn’t a positive trend, given that our skin has become increasingly sensitive over recent decades due to various products we apply.

Salicylic acid is a Beta Hydroxy Acid and, in its pure form, is harmful to the skin. It’s typically sourced from plants but is often synthetically reproduced by heating phenol with carbon dioxide.

Why shouldn’t you choose a salicylic acid-based exfoliant? Salicylic acid can etch our skin pores, enlarging them over time. Don’t we all desire smooth, fine pores?