We all know the effect a bad skin day can have on our mood. You wake up to a hormonal breakout on the first day of a new job and your confidence starts to slip. You get a rosacea flare-up on your wedding weekend and suddenly it’s all you can think about. But what if it wasn’t just the appearance of your skin messing with your head? What if your skin itself—and the bacteria living on it—were directly influencing the chemicals in your brain?
New, groundbreaking research suggests it might be doing exactly that. The paper, “Microbiome Composition and Psychological Wellbeing”, published in the British Journal of Dermatology, found that the skin microbiome and psychological wellbeing may be interconnected in what scientists are now calling the skin-brain axis—the idea that the bacteria living on your skin could be shaping how stressed, calm, or even happy you feel.
