I am not going to even start to explain what this post link is all about beyond telling you that it describes a revolutionary new ‘bacterial therapy for the skin’ in which, far from washing bacteria off your skin with soap and shower gel, you actually apply them to your skin where they act as a ‘built-in cleanser, deodorant, anti-inflammatory and immune booster by feeding on the ammonia in our sweat and converting it into nitrite and nitric oxide.’
If you are intrigued, just read this lengthy article in the New York Times by health writer Julia Scott who spent four weeks testing out the living bacterial skin tonic developed by AOBiome in Cambridge Mass.
Illustration courtesy of the Online Journal of Community and Person-Centred Dermatology featuring a website devoted to the skin biome – www.skinmicrobiome.
I read about this in New Scientist too. Would you like to send you a scanned copy? Very interesting subject. There seems to be too much fear of being dirty and people are now way too clean and sterile in my opinion. I’m experimenting with a natural crystal deodorant at the moment. Loving it! and hope I’m not smelly…
Thanks Ruth for the offer – but I do not really know what to do with paper these days!! I suspect that the NYT said v dry much the same as the New Scientist – and of course it is not really that ‘new’ news if you already subscribe to the hygiene hypothesis!
Confirmation and support from someone who has not applied anything other than water to any part of their body for at least ten years.
This is just another probiotic therapy for the skin really, isn’t it, except for skin you can actually see? The gut is just a big tube of skin really and some people regard it as actually ‘outside’ the body in some senses. I think it makes sense. Natren have been making probiotic skin creams for decades for the same reason. Fascinating stuff!