Your beautiful and soft skin does amazing things for you completely unnoticed. In fact, you usually notice the important role of your skin only when it feels bad for some reason and can't do its job properly. When your skin's own protective mechanisms weaken, the skin can feel dry and rough or it can become inflamed, and then it cannot maintain its important moisture balance. In this case, your skin is exposed to various stimuli, premature aging and possible pathogenic microbes, which can cause inflammation under suitable conditions.
In order for the skin to function as well as possible, it is important that it receives the right kind of support internally and externally:♡ Eat enough good fats, protein and fiber-rich vegetables, which also contain antioxidants, vitamins and minerals. You can get good fats from, for example, avocado, seeds and nuts. Fiber is found in broccoli, berries, beans and peas and whole grains. When your gut microbes are healthy, your skin is usually healthy too!
♡ Internal nutrients enable your skin to be able to
to produce not only the right kinds of moisture factors for the cell medium, but also the right kinds of fatty substances to nourish the microbes that maintain the balance of your skin, prevent moisture from evaporating and keep the surface of your skin soft and flexible.
♡ Externally, you can support the skin with the right types of fats and moisturising ingredients. For example, in Moi Forest products, organic birch sap and vegetable oils containing omega fatty acids that help your skin's protective barrier work better.
Although your skin acts as a protective shield against external stimuli and components, it is much more than just a physical protective shield. It takes care of the body's temperature regulation and prevents the evaporation of fluids from our body, so that our body does not dry out. The skin also produces vitamin D with the help of the sun's UVB radiation and acts as an important detection tissue for the immune system. In addition, the skin gathers information about our environment not only through the sense of touch, but also through the exchange of genes between microbes and the recognition of microbes. In recent years, researchers have also found evidence of communication between the skin, gut and brain, via the nervous system and microbes.
Microbes in the skin 🔬
Your skin consists of several layers of cells and a dozen microbes are attached to the cell membrane of each of your skin cells. Every microbe attached to a skin cell communicates with the cell and affects its function. Microbes living in the skin also communicate with each other and convey messages from the surface layer of the skin to deeper skin layers and to the immune system through receptors that recognise the protein structures of the microbial cell membranes.
In the 2010s, we have realised that a person is a combination of several organisms - human cells and microbes - and that the functioning of our entire body depends on the microbes that live in it, and this also applies to the skin. Instead of all microbes being harmful, it has been noticed that the more different microbes live in balance in us, the healthier we are. When researchers have compared, for example, the microbiota of African hunter-gatherer tribes with the microbiota of people living in Western living conditions, it has been noticed that Western people have already lost a third of the diversity of their microbiome. So we have lost a large part of the microbes that could prevent diseases in our body. Finnish researchers have also made similar findings when comparing the microbiomes of children living in Karelia on the Russian side and children living in the Karelia region on the Finnish side.
The importance of the skin as a maintainer of our health has grown with microbial research. In a study carried out by the universities of Helsinki, Tampere and Turku, it was found that in addition to the fact that the microbes in the gut can affect the microbial balance of the skin, the microbes in the skin can also affect the microbial balance in the gut.
Basically, everything we put on our skin can also affect our entire microbiome! This actually revolutionises the whole meaning of skin care. And this made us think about what the skin and its microbes should really be exposed to. That's why we combined skin-nourishing, caring and moisturising ingredients with forest microbial extract, i.e. forest dust®!
Forest dust®:
- Contains thousands of microbes and parts of microbes
- Gives a strengthening signal to the immune system through skin receptors
- Nourishes the microbes that help maintain the balance of the skin
- Contains minerals that support the function of skin cells
What does Moi Forest mean to be microbiome friendly?
The mild food-grade preservatives used in Moi Forest creams and their concentrations (sodium levulinate, sodium anisate and sodium dehydroacetate) have been chosen so that they do not disturb the microbial balance of the skin or the activity of the forest dust®. These substances can also be found naturally in plants, for example sodium anisate is found in fennel, sodium levulinate is obtained from potato starch and sodium dehydroacetate is found in a plant called Yellow Daisy. The pH of the products is also adjusted so that it supports the microbial balance of the skin with a pH of 5, unlike, for example, in soap, which can have a pH of 9 - i.e. alkaline. In terms of the skin and the microbes that maintain its balance, the optimal pH is around 3.5 - 5.5 (varies depending on the area of the skin), i.e. slightly acidic.
With the help of Moi Forest products, we want to strengthen the connection with nature, the skin and the whole body's microbiome!