Neuroscientist and skin expert Dr. Claudia Aguirre talked about the skin:brain connection during a keynote session at GWS, highlighting that we are only beginning to understand the science of how the state of the skin affects and reflects our health.

Using imagery by photographer Claire Felicie to illustrate her point, Aguirre showed how traditional medicine – topical creams – didn’t treat the skin conditions caused by different types of psychological trauma. For example, a high school ballerina with a wart on the sole of her foot who was struggling to identify whether she wanted to continue dancing after graduation needed a combination of hypnosis and skincare – something Aguirre calls derma-psychology. A boy who developed chronic eczema after a car crash, in which his mother died, was struggling with loss. An army pilot whose forehead developed blisters every time he flew over a particular canyon was suffering from guilt, because his friend flew the plane one day when the pilot was sick – the replacement pilot crashed in the canyon and died.

“To treat the skin, we have to treat the mind first,” said Aguirre, who is working in cooperation with Comfort Zone.

The skin is being seen now as a self-organising entity and a social organ, according to Aguirre. Aguirre quoted a study that shows that there is a neural basis of sensitive skin. Lactic acid was dabbed into the nasal labial fold of a set of people who say they have sensitive skin and those who say they don’t. An MRI scan of both sets of people showed a clear neurobiological difference between someone who says they have sensitive skin and someone who says they don’t in terms of their brain response.

“Now we can treat skin with a more holistic point of view, due to discoverable connections found by scientists in the last 10 years or so,” said Aguirre. “For example, the skin – as an organ – has a stress axis all of its own, independent of the central nervous system. It produces hormones all of its own. It has its own machinery. This shifts the paradigm of how we think about the skin.

According to Aguirre, the skin can also tell time. “Every cell has a clock. At night, it knows that it is night time so it does something different, which therefore means a person’s skincare regimen could be different.”

Aguirre believes the skin is a social organ. “The first sense humans develop is touch,” she said. “If a baby doesn’t receive touch from its mother, this changes the way a child grows up: they may not be resilient to disease or stress.”

Aguirre highlighted that it takes, on average, 10 years for the medical community to take on board ideas by scientists and it then takes another 10 years for those ideas to reach consumers. For example, consumers are now aware of the gut:brain connection, but there’s a new brain in the skin that is set to be accepted by medical and consumer communities worldwide, she said.