I'm Dr man Shaw a board certified dermatologist and I'm here today to answer more questions from the internet this is skin [Music] support at Mia pinchoff asks how many layers of skin do we have ball park it depends on how you look at the layers of the skin so there's really three major layers of the skin there's the epidermis which is everything from this purple upwards the dermis which is where your collagen is and then there's the hypodermis which is your fat and the muscle and everything that's below that you'll hear a lot of times five layers of the skin but they're not talking about the entire skin in general they're talking specifically about that epidermus layer which has four when you're looking at the face and it has five layers when you're looking at the Palms and Soles at Ryan M Striker asks is it possible that your lips can become addicted to chapstick so a lot of times people like those fragranced and flavored lip balms but it turns out that those a lot of times are irritating the skin which makes you want to actually apply them more often not just that but if you're somebody who's using flavored lip balms it's going to make you lick your lips more often and that licking of your lips has enzymes in it that actually breaks down the skin around it making you want to apply it more so my recommendation avoid fragrances in your lip balms avoid mint in your lip balms avoid any flavors in your lip balms and use something that's gentle and fragrance-free and you'll probably see a huge benefit and you won't have to apply it as often at CeeLo 72 asks what causes dry skin skin so there's a few things that cause dry skin one it's your genetics two it's your environment and three it's things that you potentially are doing wrong so from a genetic perspective a lot of people with eczema or atopic dermatitis they have dry skin because they have abnormal lipid content and that epidermal layer of the skin low lipids like ceramides or abnormal lipids can cause you to naturally have drier skin the second thing is the environment so if you're in a condition that it's very cold you have low humidity we know that when the humidity drops in a room within one day your skin actually becomes dehydrated from losing water to the environment and then the third thing is things that you potentially are doing wrong so using very harsh cleansers overs scrubbing the skin or using hot showers now think about it like this when you're washing your dishes with cold water you notice it doesn't remove the oils that well but when you wash your dishes with hot water or warm water it removes oils much more effectively and the same thing happens in your skin when you take a hot shower it strips away all those natural oils which can make your skin more dry at Cosmo damage asks why is vitamin D so important for the skin so it's not actually that vitamin D is important for the skin it's that the skin is important for your vitamin D levels about 90% of the vitamin D in your body comes from the Skin So sunlight actually converts cholesterol into Vitamin D producing most of the vitamin D in your body only about 10% comes from your diet vitamin D is super important to bone health in general so there's something called rickets when you have low vitamin D levels your bones actually become very very soft and they Bend and they break very very easily J Mick asked how does one get rid of an ingrown hair so what you see here is actually a hair follicle and outside of that hair follicle you're growing that hair now that's normal hair growth but with an ingrown hair that hair can actually grow out and turn back into the skin or sometimes it gets trapped and it never makes it out of the skin while it's embedded in the skin that can actually cause quite a bit of inflammation and irritation and so what you'll actually notice is a red and painful bump now your body can sometimes push out that ingrown hair but what ends up happening a lot of times is that you actually need to get it physically extracted by a dermatologist or an aesthetician that can find the root of that hair and pull it out now you could do this at home if you clean the area and you use tweezers but definitely be careful because you can develop a worsening infection now if you want to prevent these ingrown hairs from happening avoiding much shorter hair so if you if you don't shave your hair very short that can prevent ingrown hairs and if you use a glycolic acid exfoliant that can also prevent ingrown hairs and I've noticed in my own personal experience using an electric trimmer prevents ingrown hairs for me compared to using a traditional razor fun characteristically asks what is sweat composed of what makes it smell how might sweat on one part of the body differ from another there's two major forms of sweat gland so one is your echine sweat gland so when you get sweaty Palms in soles that's majority echine sweat it's pretty much just water and salt and that sweat is actually usually pretty odorless now when we think about body odor the type of sweat gland that's producing body odor is something called the aine gland and those aprin glands are pretty much not active until puberty and those are the ones that you find in the armpits the groin underneath the breast and that's the one that produces that odorous smell a lot of people don't realize that when you sweat apre and sweat it's actually odorless when you secrete it onto the body it's mostly composed of lipids and then you actually have bacteria on the skin they convert that solution into something that smells bad ammonia and short chain fatty acids and so if you eliminate the bacteria that's converting that sweat you can actually eliminate body odor so things like Benzel broide and chlorexidine washes are really good at eliminating body odor at Roa Aesthetics asks what is the Skin's microbiome I don't want to freak anyone out right now but if I was to scrape your skin right now and look at it under the microscope you would have essentially a jungle of organisms living on your skin every single one of you I don't care how much you wash your face you would have bacteria you would have fungus and you would have little mites crawling around on your skin right now and that little jungle is actually called the microbiome and they usually live in harmony and cause no problems to the Skin In fact when there's a good healthy mix of things growing on your skin it's actually good for you and it's when one type of organism starts to sort of lead the jungle is when you start to develop things like acne at FS chick asks how TF is the skin and organ so an organ is supposed to be a collection of tissue that all serve the same purpose the skin is considered an organ because because its function is to protect you from the environment and also to keep things in the skin so if you don't have your skin which we actually see in people that have severe burns all over the body you dehydrate very quickly because all the water in your body evaporates and you get infections very quickly because your Skin's not protecting you from the environment at Fame de laflor asks does retinol cream really work I personally use retinol so I I certainly hope that it works if you're a skincare Enthusiast or even if you're on social media you probably hear about all kinds of crazy trending ingredients all the time and most of them don't stand the test of time but retinol on the other hand which is a vitamin a derivative that we find in skincare has been around now for 50 years and the data is only getting better and so tretinoin which is the active form of retinol it's found in prescription products is incredibly effective and then retinol is converted to tretinoin in the skin and is a very effective over-the-counter version of this vitamin a derivative at real nutritious asks do you know what really causes wrinkles with time there's two things that happen so first you want want to look at yourself as a grape when you're a child you're filled with Juicy fluids and you don't have any wrinkles and then you lose that volume with time and you become more like a raisin and what is that volume that you're losing collagen fat bone your skin starts to move in the direction of gravity and then you form wrinkles one of the most important contributors to aging is sun exposure and also diet diets high in sugar cause glycation which actually damages your collagen and when you lose that collagen your wrinkles start to become more prominent and So to avoid wrinkles you want to protect yourself from the Sun you want to use healthy diets that are low in inflammation and you also want to do things that replenish the collagen like use things like retinol at Trenton Ferg asks if we shed skin cells every single day how is it that people have tattoos this is such a good question so when we look at our skin shedding every day we're actually talking about that epidermis layer of the skin that kind of sloths off every day so that's that very top layer of the skin but below that where all your collagen is hanging out that's your dermis and that's actually where they deposit tattoos and that's why you don't shed off your tattoos and interestingly the particles of tattoo are too large to actually move and have your body remove them from the dermis and so they actually just hang out there in the dermis at CBG Beauty Bar asks what does an LED light therapy mask do this is a LED mask and what you're noticing back here is some red light to be honest I honestly thought this was a gimmick myself I did a lot of research on LED masks in general and it turns out they've done us quite a bit of study on light in general so LED basically produces light and different wavelengths when you look at what blue light does to the skin it actually has anti-inflammatory and antibacterial properties of the Skin So if you have acne it can actually Target the porins within your acne causing bacteria to eliminate that and then when you look at red light the wavelength of red light between 600 and 700 nanm can actually Target the fiber blasts in that dermis layer of the skin to induce collagen production we call that photob biomod modulation and so red light actually has profound anti-aging benefits and actually can help quite a bit with wrinkles butterscotch good 3724 asks do you think medical grade skincare is better than over-the-counter type items I am here to debunk this and probably save a lot of use of money right now so medical great skincare is purely a marketing term there is no standard definition of what medical grade skincare is if a aesthetician Med Spa Dermatology office or plastic surgery office is selling you skincare a lot of times they will tell you that it's medical grade skincare it just means they're selling it from their office I could take a tu a toothpaste and call it medical grade skincare and no one is going to stop me you would hate me but no one is going to stop me at Jess R Morris asks my freckles are going wild because of the sun I love freckles so much please why can't they be on me all year round so what are freckles in the first place freckles are little blotches of melanin which is basically the pigment of the skin and so your melanocytes which are the pigment producing cells of the skin get hyperactivated and they produce little blotches now I love freckles I think that they're beautiful but they get worse or more prominent with sun exposure and they fade in the winter when you get less sun exposure so they're basically like mini Tans which is a marker of sun damage and we do know that people that are prone to freckles are more likely to develop skin cancer so if you're somebody who developed freckles please be careful wear sunscreen your freckles will still be there they just won't be as prominent but it will also decrease your risk of getting skin cancer at Sophia Kareem asks how fast does hair grow the average is essentially half an inch a month it really depends on who you are but it depends also on what part of the body they all have different life cycles so the the life cycle of the hair is much longer on the scalp than it is on the eyebrows and that's why your hair can be different on different parts of the body but in general to answer your question about half an inch a month at AR 22323 so why why are stretch marks permanent people have actually biopsied stretch marks what you find is a very thin epidermis and you actually find a scar-like pattern in the dermis where the collagen bundles and the elastic fibers are different than a normal skin and so those different collagen fibers are actually causing that stretch mark to hang out for much longer after the stretching and growing has occurred at Vegas Vanda ey asks why do we turn red when we get embarrassed how does this help us survive well we don't really know why this could be beneficial for you what we do know is that what ends up happening what's actually causing that redness is vasod dilation of your blood vessels so they become dilated and that increased blood flow appears as redness when you're embarrassed at Wanda lapun what exactly is psoriasis psoriasis is an inflammatory condition in the body so what it looks like to you is plaques on the skin so you have redness on top of that redness is a micacious silvery scale it's not contagious at all but what's actually happening underneath those plaques is inflammation it's really important to control that inflammation cuz not only is it affecting the skin but it's affecting other organs in the body like the heart at EXO sopia asks products aside how many steps is your skincare routine my current skincare routine is eight steps but I feel like it needs to be 10 I feel like it needs to be less quite honestly me personally I have a three-step skincare routine maximum cleanse treat and protect cleanse is just a simple cleanser treatment is something that's targeted towards you so if you have acne you're going to use a treatment that's targeted towards acne if you have dark spots the treatment is going to be targeted towards dark spots and then protect at night that means moisturize in the morning that means wear sunscreen at Mah asks does anyone have an SPF recommendation for people of color I'm sick of these brutal white casts so first what is a white cast it's that pasty white appearance that you see when people are wearing sunscreen some of you might remember that famous Mark Zucker bird surfing picture where he has that amazing white cast Over the face as a dermatologist I loved it but it's not necessarily the thing that most people want to have when they're walking around outside so when you're looking at sunscreens you have your chemical and you have your mineral sunscreens your chemical sunscreens are pretty much invisible A lot of the times nowadays you can have a chemical sunscreen that is completely see-through and then you have your mineral sunscreen that are zinc and titanium dioxide and no matter how good the sunscreen is they're still going to have a little bit of white cast when you're looking at those mineral sunscreens so if you're somebody who wants to completely avoid a white cast opt for something that's more of a chemical sunscreen now a lot of people are concerns about chemicals I'm personally not worried about chemical sunscreens the only ingredient I tell my patients to avoid is oxybenzone otherwise the rest have been shown to be safe and effective at Apollo herbs asks what's the difference between a serum a cream and a lotion so there's no strict definition in what any of these things mean it really has to do with the the heaviness of the product overall a Serum is going to be the lightest weight version of their product it's almost going to be like a liquid a gel is going to be a little bit closer to a cream but it's going to be a little bit more liquidy then a lotion is a little bit heavier than a gel and then a cream is a little bit heavier than a lotion and then an ointment is a little bit heavier than a cream at Emily Sarah asks am I the only weirdo who wonders why blackheads are black and yet yellow when squeezed out you're definitely not the only weirdo cuz I personally have asked this question many many times before when you actually are secreting this what's happening in in your pore essentially is that you have oil glands and skin cells that are sloughing off into the pore and they're clogging the pores with all of that sebum and sebaceous filaments sebaceous is essentially just the technical term for oil and it's naturally a yellow substance but then at the tip of it the tip closest to the surface is exposed to light and air and with exposure to light and air that yellow is oxidized and so it becomes black and it becomes what we call a blackhead but once you push it out you still have that yellow natural substance underneath it at just DD asks question of the day why do we all have fingerprints so we know that fingerprints develop at roughly 20 weeks when you're still in the womb and it's a combination of things but it's actually LED mostly by genetics there's a few things too that contribute to this so it could be the amount of amniotic fluid SL slushing around when you're in the womb it could be the movement patterns it could have to do with gravity to some extent but we do know that genetic programming plays a really big role because if you were to scrape off your fingerprints you would actually grow back the same fingerprints throughout your entire life they actually never change it's been debated why we even have fingerprints and actually nobody knows but we do believe that fingerprints actually do add some grip and so that's the running thesis but we actually have no idea how this beautiful body works at P Radiance HW asks # skincare does the weather affect your skin so let's talk about the extreme conditions winter and summer so in the winter it's very dry it's very cold and so people's skin tends to get very dry you lose a lot of moisture from your skin into the environment and a lot of people need to use more moisturizing products now just because it's the winter and you're not getting as much sun exposure doesn't mean you don't need to wear sunscreen because you still get UVA and UVB exposure especially if you're skiing and in high altitudes so definitely wear sunscreen in the winter as well now when we look at the summer the extreme conditions of that heat humidity so your skin tends to not be as dry but you're exposed to much more sunlight and this is where you're going to be more diligent about sunscreen if you're out at the beach and going to be in the sun all day reapplying your sunscreen every 2 hours is going to make a big difference that wraps up skin support I hope you learned something we'll see you next time