Science + Research

In this post, we clarify what “barrier function” actually means, how it works, and what you can do to not only support it, but actually improve it. Because here’s the thing – if you don’t have healthy barrier function, you don’t have healthy skin. Period. It won’t function well, and it certainly won’t look good.

Having a glowing complexion is a wonderful thing! However, it’s important to realize that while beauty may be your primary motivator for adopting smart skin care practices, the reasons to take care of your skin go far beyond looking good. As part of our ongoing series of articles with basic information about the skin, in this post we’ll go over some of the reasons taking good care of it is critical to overall wellness.

The tidal wave of handwashing that has occurred since the arrival of the novel coronavirus has constituted a pretty significant change in our lives! Even the most diligent hand-washers among us have increased the frequency we were accustomed to, often by orders of magnitude. Since we’re in the business of helping you take the best care of your skin possible, we offer the following tips to make sure you are not only protecting yourself from Covid-19, but also improving the overall health of the skin on your hands.

When most people think of the circulatory system, high blood pressure, strokes, and heart attacks are the first things that come to mind. And those are indeed common issues! However, there’s much more to it — maintaining good circulation has benefits that go far beyond avoiding blood and heart-related illnesses. My practice is focused on skin health, and as we’ll see, there is a direct correlation between healthy circulation and healthy skin. But before we get into that, let’s take a moment to understand how the circulatory system functions, and how it is connected with all the different systems that keep our body functioning optimally.

At Marie Veronique, we talk so often about how to get and keep your skin healthy that we thought it would be helpful to take a step back and share some fundamental information about the skin. After all, if you want to understand how our products work, it’s helpful to understand how the skin works. 

This overview of the structure and function of the skin may take you back to your high school biology days (no passing notes!), but we’ll try to keep it on the interesting side. 

At Marie Veronique, we focus on learning everything we can about the roles the various microbiomes in our body play in keeping us, and in particular our skin, healthy. We’ve become so familiar with microbes like Propionibacterium acnes and Staphylococcus epidermidis that they practically feel like our next door neighbors.

In actuality, these bacteria and millions of others like them are even closer to us than our real next door neighbors because they live in and on us—in our gut, our pores, our eyelashes, you name it. There isn’t a crevice, cranny, or fold on the inside or outside of our body that isn’t inhabited by tiny microorganisms ranging from fairly large mites to microscopic microbes.