Skin Health

Jonathan Clogstoun-Willmott

August 14, 2024

Skin Health – various aspects

skin age and sun screens
dryness
signs of heat
our largest organ

Skin Health and Age

Question about skin health:

“Hi I was wondering if you could explain skin aging and what causes it, there’s a new craze with sunscreen and doctors saying wrinkles are caused by the sun, what are your thoughts on this from a Chinese medicine perspective?”

Answer:

We live in yin bodies, protected by a comparatively yang skin. This protects us against yin and yang factors from outside.
Our skin is mostly waterproof, so we don’t leak water inwards when we swim and, nourished by Qi and the Blood it leads, our skin remains moist, flexible and resilient against most yang factors, like minor accidents, mild burns and scrapes.
It interfaces with the air and light, including the sun’s rays. For health we need yin and yang, and the sun provides essential yang.
However, the sun is also, for most of us, the most yang thing we encounter. Physically, it heats and dries, hence sunburn and heat-stroke.
In protecting itself, the skin needs more yin factors, like Blood to mend and moisture – sweat – to cool, or it loses its moist flexibility.
Too much sun yang overheats and dehydrates the skin and underlying tissues. When young and healthy, our supplies of Qi and Blood are plentiful, so our skin recovers.
As we age, our bodies become less efficient at making Qi and Blood, so skin repairs take longer or don’t work so well. Then our skin dries out.

If Blood can’t repair such heat damage, skin loses its supple humidity. In effect, it ages faster. This often means a thicker layer of skin, like a thicker wall against invaders, instead of the springy resistance of before. So, don’t over-expose your skin to rampant sun, and if that is unavoidable, be careful to use a sunscreen.

Which sunscreen?

In Britain we have a consumer organisation that publishes a monthly magazine called ‘Which?’. Every year it examines a range of sunscreens and makes recommendations. But whatever they recommend, remember that your skin is not wholly impermeable, so you will absorb some of the chemicals in the sunscreen, for better or worse – a big topic on which I claim no expert knowledge.

Importance – for skin health – of what you eat and drink

Remember that your supplies of Qi and Blood come from what you eat and drink. The wrong foods and drinks, or not enough of them, or badly digested etc, won’t supply the means for your Blood to repair your skin. Read our pages on Nutrition, Warming and Cooling foods. They show you how to use food to increase health and reduce illness.

The wrong foods make your skin more vulnerable to damage and less able to repair itself properly. For skin health, eat right! Skin creams and emollients don’t compete with the right foods!

Skin health from Mediterranean diet — Mediterranean Diet for Health, especially Skin Health

Increasingly, the Mediterranean diet is seen as being a healthy option, though if you are sick, I think the Chinese perspective would suggest that you should avoid cold foods and drinks and take food cooked and warm until you recover.

Other nations have different dietary approaches, often using spices to stimulate your Lungs to function more efficiently in their management of your skin and your Large Intestine to purge heat. This is a big topic.

Mental health from the Sun

Nearly everyone benefits from the sun.

[Nearly everyone? That means not everyone! For example, some very yang people find direct sunlight hard to tolerate. The same applies to people who are very yin-deficient. But even here, probably a little sunlight and warmth is beneficial.]

Sunlight has nutritional benefits (Vitamin D, for example) which help mental health. Some people get mental problems from living in dark climates, and benefit from increased exposure to sunlight, even if artificial.

The sun, and sunrise, have inspired many religious festivals. The darkest days of the year, when the sun begins its climb towards summer, symbolises rebirth.

Rebirth renews hope and a positive outlook which supports skin health.

What Chinese medicine says about Skin Health

You have read above about the importance of nutrition for skin health.

But actually, nutrition and your digestion aren’t the main focus in Chinese medicine for skin health.

Instead, it’s the health of your Lungs.

Look at the skin of heavy, long-term, smokers. (I’m thinking here mainly of tobacco smokers, but it probably applies to vape smokers too.)

Smoking coarsens your skin, ageing it, often enlarging your pores and making your face skin paler: often it looks drier and dirtier.

woman wearing black fur coat smoking — Long-term tobacco smoking ages your skin and lungs.

Why?

Just a few, out of many, reasons:

Smoke contaminates the air you inhale
Even if flavoured with mint, the smoke you inhale is hot – if from tobacco – which dries your lungs. That dryness is reflected in your skin – bad for skin health! – leading to eczema.
The smoke contains carbon which, impossible to exhale, gets attached to lung tissue, preventing oxygen from entering and carbon dioxide leaving your body. This degrades yout Lung Yang energy.
So smoke particles, in effect, enter the blood, which therefore can’t properly nourish your skin, or you, so you look pale. Or it increases heat in your body, leading to inflamed, red facial skin.

man using smoking pipe beside road — Smoking can burn and dry your lungs, leading to red facial skin.

Often carbon particles in the lungs prevent your Lungs from descending and dissipating qi, leading to a form of Lung qi stagnation which leads on to the formation of phlegm … and breathlessness, potentially respiratory disease and asthma.
This degrades the health of your Lungs (read more under Lungs Function and Lung deficiency) which makes your more susceptible to disease and slower to recover after it.