Yes, Your Skin Makes Its Own "Anti-Aging" Actives — What To Know About Postbiotics

The skin is an astounding organ. The more we learn about it, the more we uncover just how important it is for a myriad of health reasons, from playing an essential part in our immune function1 to its reciprocating role in cognitive health2 to helping regulate internal inflammation. Overall health is dependent on the skin, just in the same way that our skin health is dependent on the body.   

The skin is also a very resilient organ. It has a profound ability to withstand and recover. Given the skin's role as a barrier, this ability to heal itself is paramount as it's constantly bombarded with stressors (both internal and external) that it has to deflect and manage. 

But it's not alone in this fight. In fact, it has a very important helper: your skin microbiome, an ecosystem of organisms that live on and in the skin. The microbiome has many functions, and one of the most vital—we are learning—is all about its very precious outputs.

Examples of those byproducts include things like hyaluronic acid, lactic acid, peptides, essential fatty acids, enzymes, minerals, and vitamins. If these all sound like "anti-aging" skin care ingredients you pay top dollar for, you're correct: The very same "anti-aging" ingredients found in creams and serums are actually naturally made by the skin microbiome. 

To understand how the skin makes its own "skin care" ingredients, we must first understand the microbiome. The skin microbiome3, sometimes called the skin flora, is the term for the trillions of organisms4 that live on our skin. 

For example let's look at Lactobacillales, the "educational" bacteria of the skin. It's actually a strain of bacteria that populates our skin in our youth5 but declines as we age. 

As its role as an educator, it teaches skin to act young, protect itself, and revitalize barrier function. Its postbiotics are things like peptides (even more specifically oligopeptide-5 through -13) and fatty acids (including essential fatty acids).

Or Staphylococcus hominis produces antimicrobial peptides6, which support the skin's immune function and reduce inflammation. The strain Lactobacillus plantarum has been shown to increase hyaluronic acid production in the skin7, as well as reduce proinflammatory cytokines. 

In an ideal world—one in which your skin's ecosystem is unbothered by environmental agitators, internal stressors, and other damaging irritants—your microbiome would do this all on its own, all of the time. That's not the world we live in. 

The skin microbiome doesn't always produce this beneficial mix of postbiotics. Or perhaps the skin microbiome doesn't produce these byproducts as optimally as it could, nor does it produce as wide of a variety. In fact, sometimes the skin microbiome produces non-beneficial outputs that trigger inflammation, resulting in irritation, acne, premature aging, and various skin diseases. 

This happens when the skin is in dysbiosis8, which is a medical term that means "an imbalance in the microbial community that is associated with disease." So when experts talk about the importance of "balancing" your skin microbiome, it's not just some feel-good, "let's just all live in harmony" verbiage. It's a scientific concept rooted in the research of the microbiome. Within the context of the skin, dysbiosis means there's less variety of microbes, the ratio of organisms is thrown off, or a combination of both situations. 

The unfortunate news is that there are a wide variety of factors that can contribute to dysbiosis, many of which are just functions of modern living. We're also still learning more about what triggers skin dysbiosis, and what "balance" actually looks like—so the research is continually evolving.