Dr. Teo Soleymani
Appearances
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
At best.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
Well, we know that when people use it, it does provide benefits that outweigh the risks of blistering sunburns so it's it wants to do the right thing the problem is the way it's formulated the way people use it is not perfect so i can't give it a drf because their traditional sunscreens are intended to do their job they're intended to provide protection the biggest problem is
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
The cosmeceutical industry has played a big role in making a lot of subpar chemicals that are, you know, panda sunscreen. The second problem is most people don't even put on enough. And the third factor is we know that other forms of sun protection, shade, shelter, supplements, actually have a better role of protecting your skin than sunscreen. So...
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
Oh, this is, if you couldn't hit a bigger category than the sun. So. I love the sun. I'm a skin cancer surgeon. I'm a dermatologist. I see a lot of patients with sun-related conditions. It's essentially more than 80% of my practice. Do I think we need to be afraid of the sun? Absolutely not.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
If you pick the right, there's a lot of asterisks to that. If you pick the right sunscreen, if you use the right amount on your skin, then it would be a B or A or I probably wouldn't put it as S. But there's a lot of chemical sunscreens that are not great for the body. There's a lot of...
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
emerging or smoldering data suggesting they actually may be even deleterious to certain hormone messaging signals and endocrine disruption and even some of the breakdown products are carcinogenic themselves so that's a huge problem number two is most people don't put on enough to get the spf that's written on the bottle itself so i don't know about you but i ever since i was a kid till almost adulthood i didn't know i had to put a shot glass worth of sunscreen on you know crazy
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
I put a little bit on and I assumed that was it. Like that's what my parents told me, you know? So C, because I think it's well-intended. It's trying to do good, but it's not a B or an A because there's better forms and the stuff out there, a lot of it's crap, man. A lot of it's not great.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
100%.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
So in every single state, and I will... I will paint this in even a simpler
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
um image you literally cannot burn if you're in the shade like you cannot burn if you're in the shade but you can burn if you put on sunscreen if you're out and long enough you don't put on enough it washes off it wears off you sweat it off so just that concept to grasp you literally cannot burn if you're in the shade whether you're outside for 24 hours or two hours we know in every single study that's looked head-to-head at physical barriers so clothing hats shade shelter
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
versus topical products, meaning sunscreens, The physical barriers have outperformed every single study compared to the topical sunscreens in protecting you against sun damage, sunburns, and downstream effects. So we know, you know, you can see actually you bring up Kenya as a good, great place that, you know, they are world-class marathon runners.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
And my colleagues on the East Coast will probably want to kill me for saying this stuff, but I'm just not one to want to dress like a beekeeper and go outside. Now, just like with anything in life, too much of a good thing can be a bad thing. You know, if you are outside and you are getting sunburns constantly, that's your body's way of telling you, hey, you're killing something.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
And you see these guys training for marathons, running, and they're running with clothing. And you assume you're scratching your head. You're like, well, he doesn't look like somebody that can burn easily. And it's hot. Why the heck is he covered up? Because they know eventually the sun will win. It's like it's a glowing star that's thousands and thousands of degrees.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
Our skin is not meant to do that. You put a car outside and it rusts after 50 years. Imagine our soft skin, right? But we know that physical barriers, one, will always provide the same SPF protection. So it doesn't change as the day goes on. Unlike topical sunscreens where you get a change as it washes off, a change as the chemical structure changes with related to UV exposure.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
And we know that you can layer, you can provide protection, you don't get absorption of physical barriers like hats and shade and shelter. So if I were to pick one, and I do this all the time, I personally tend to prefer physical barriers over sunscreen. I'm a skin cancer surgeon. I just, I don't wear sunscreen that often. I don't like it.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
If I can avoid it, if I need to, or I'm going to be outside where I know I'm going to burn, I will wear it. I'm not saying don't use it. But for me, shade and shelter and hats and SPF clothing provide much better protection for me. So I tend to use that.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
If the sun is an S, I'd put that as an A. As an A. Yeah, as an A, for sure.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
Yeah, 100%. The only downsides are honestly just cost. You've got to find some form of shade. And then if it's hot, some people don't like SPF clothing or hats or things like that. But honestly, the downside is very minimal compared to topical sunscreens and they're questionable changes that can occur.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
In fact, there's actually an interesting thing that you bring up in that a lot of patients, a lot of people, communities, populations, indigenous populations in Central America and Africa and South America take forms of sun protection that we learn from. There's a group of indigenous people that live along the Amazon River in Brazil and Mostly in Brazil.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
And they tend to go on expeditions on the river for fishing. And we found that they consume a fern before they go on these three-day fishing expeditions. They eat like this plant. And we couldn't figure out why until somebody studied it. And they found that when they ate this plant, they burned less when they were outside. They didn't have topical sunscreens the way we have at our local drugstore.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
They had physical clothing barriers and this plant. And they found that there's a fern called polypodium that they consume. And when they consume it, it increases the time they can spend in the sun before their skin burns. So just learning from populations and why they do things a certain way can just also open our eyes to other options.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
I think, unfortunately, sunscreens have been shoved down our throat, but there are also other great options and greater options out there.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
You're killing the top layer of your skin. That's what a blistering sunburn is. But we know for many different reasons that the sun actually provides a lot of benefits, both physically and mentally, and sometimes improvements in well-being that I can't quantify in a lab test. I can't necessarily measure the improvement in your health, but the sun provides it.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
Yeah, totally. Great question. Actually, funny you say that. My dad still doesn't understand what I do for a living. I say I'm a skin cancer surgeon. He's like, where did the cancer come from? I'm like, the skin. He's like, yeah, but what organ to the skin? My dad's tan. He's not just proud that you're a doctor.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
He's like, well, what's a skin cancer surgeon? So I think you bring up a good point. Generally speaking, it's an SPF somewhere between 5 to 10. You're just your native skin type. If you're a little bit darker, you can get a higher SPF equivalent. I know I can tolerate an hour out in midday sun without turning red or burning. It's very different than a Northern European skin type.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
We define them by Fitzpatrick types. In my family, there's very little skin cancer. I'm ethnically Armenian. But traditionally, Armenians are blonde-haired blue eyes. They're of the Caucasus mountain region. So somewhere in my genetics, there's a little bit of predisposition from our ancestry. But there's some protection in the more Middle Eastern blend that I have. I have olive skin.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
You're absolutely right. So I know my personal risk for skin cancer is lower than somebody from Northern Ireland. my form of sun protection primarily is more for premature aging related to sun than it is skin cancer. Now, I'm not saying I'm immune to it by all means. I just know that my risk factor is a little bit less.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
So my desire to protect myself from the sun now at this age is primarily to prevent premature aging.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
i know i need some sun i feel better i perform better i sleep better i can focus more when i get normal sunlight so i know i try to get 20 30 minutes in a day unprotected and typically in the morning yeah typically in the morning i'll go for a run in the morning or late afternoon when i get home i'll play with the kids outside and i don't have any form of protection on i know my skin doesn't turn red i don't burn so i know my threshold
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
If you know, Drew, you could probably go outside and tell me you can be out in an hour and a half and your skin really won't turn red. That's your skin's tolerance. Now, that doesn't mitigate premature aging. You know, you still if you really want to prevent UV related changes that collect over time, then you take some form of sun protection. But in terms of your aging.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
skin health risk, you have a higher tolerance than even myself per se. So I think just knowing, you know, individualized medicine, we talk about this all the time. And what does that mean? It's just knowing your body's specific capabilities and incapabilities. You know, I have patients who, ironically, my highest burden skin cancer patients are ones that avoid the sun more
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
like are deathly avoidant. They are not in the sun. The last time they were in the sun was 20 years ago, but they're on their 30th skin cancer. So those are things that go back to what we were talking about in that there's a huge genetic component to that, to it that we ignore as dermatologists. We say wear sunscreen, nothing will happen. Well, I don't know about that.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
I myself did two fellowships on the East Coast, and I knew in the gray, I didn't feel good. I wasn't happy. It would affect my quality of life. And that's not something my primary care doc, for example, could measure. But as soon as the sun came out, my feelings changed. And as a dermatologist, there is a component of the sun that you can get every single day that's safe.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
Everybody's going to age. Mother nature, father time will always win. Nobody's living finite, right? The question is, are you aging at your natural predetermined biologic clock or chronologic clock? Or are you accelerating by things that you're doing? And the example I give this, I show my kids this all the time. We take a grape and we put it in the sun.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
The problem with getting a blanket statement is that every person's body is different. Your skin type is very different than my skin type is very different than my patient's skin type. So what I can tolerate in the sun is not the same as perhaps somebody else. And figuring that out is the key for personalized medicine, right?
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
You put one grape out all day, it'll start to shrivel by the end of the day. If you take a grape and you give it 20 minutes of sun, it won't shrivel for about a week or two. but it'll eventually shrivel, right? So the same premise exists. The sun protection or UV protection, and we talk about the sun, but the sun's a whole spectrum of wavelength of light.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
The predominant ones that are a problem is in the UV region, both from a skin cancer standpoint and an aging standpoint. And when we talk about aging, it's UV-related breakdown of collagen and elastin, which is what gives our skin its elasticity, its suppleness, its volume, its look. Sun avoidance plays a much more direct, predictable role for premature aging than it does the cancer side.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
So if you are somebody that wants to maintain the skin that you had as a baby, which I'm not sure why you'd want to do that, but if you wanted perfectly flawless skin for the rest of your life, then you would take much more sun protective measures. We know that association or that correlation is very linear.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
Now, that being said, there are things that you can do to mitigate sun and sun damage that you've had in the past. So it's not like, oh, you know, the stuff you did in your teens and 20s and 30s, that's it. You're going to be a shriveled raisin in your 40s and 50s. It's not the case.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
But just like, and no offense to anybody who's a vegan or doesn't believe in like leather or whatnot, but when you take hide and you leave it in the sun, it turns into tan, wrinkled leather. Same thing as our skin, right? aesthetically conscious, then your desire for sun protection may be more than somebody who's not.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
So patients who are in the hospital, they look pale. They look ghastly. They're ill. And when you look at people who avoid the sun strictly in big cities, New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, et cetera, they have a similar appearance. And one cohort of patients are not sick. Another cohort of patients are sick. But your body has a very keen ability to tell you, hey, something's a little off.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
And I'm not saying tanning means you're healthy. But there's a reason when you come back from vacation, you have a little bit of a vacation glow. It's your body has rested. It's tend to calm down. Usually we get a little bit more sun exposure and things like that when we're on vacation, especially summertime vacation. The problem with that is being able to measure that.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
For example, if you are somebody who's had a strong family history of skin cancer or you have certain conditions in which you cannot tolerate the sun, let's say you have melasma, which is a condition we see in pregnancy in women a lot, or if you have lupus, some of these sun-sensitive conditions, then maybe you can only tolerate five minutes of sunlight before your skin tells you something.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
And no doc will be able to measure your exposure to sun and say, hey, Drew, you're healthier because you're getting some sunlight.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
What's below F? Can I put it below F? So, so many things to talk about in this. And a lot of the institutions have outside funding that affects their studies. Unfortunately, institutions are not immune to bias. We see this all the time. Also, just, and this is anecdotal, but almost every single person will agree with this. When you go to Europe, you can eat
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
The stuff that you cannot eat in the States, five days a week and you feel fine. The amount of industrialized products in our foods is monumental in the States. It's a huge problem. I tend to be on the camp that thinks seed oils should not be in our diet. Seed oils are pro-inflammatory.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
I notice and we see this when you eliminate this in skin conditions that are inflammatory, psoriasis, eczema, their skin improves. We actually put patients on anti-inflammatory diets. We did this up at Stanford. I do it in my practice. When you get rid of inflammatory foods, including seed oils, you can get an improvement in actual quantifiable skin disease. I have psoriasis myself.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
Every time I have a junk diet for a couple of weeks, my psoriasis flares and it's reproducible. So I know it's not just a one-off. I can consistently make it flare with my diet and improve it. Now, will it go away? No, but it's one less added drug or medicine that I need to use to cure something that I'm trying to cure.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
So seed oil, there's a huge connection between the skin and the gut and the microbiome and the immune system. immense connection. We're only just now unveiling it. We know that the gut microbiome plays an important role in our skin's immune response. The organisms in our gut that metabolize the food release metabolic byproducts, kind of like the exhaust of your car, right?
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
It emits essentially invisible gases that are byproducts of your combustion engine. Those microorganisms, food breakdown byproducts modulate and affect our skin's immune system. So when our microbiome in our gut is metabolizing things that it normally doesn't like to metabolize or cannot tolerate metabolizing very well, you see immune dysregulation in the skin.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
If you have more ethnic melanin, you can tolerate the sun a little bit more. If you have no strong family or personal history of skin cancer, you can tolerate it more. So I think of sun avoidance is a problem.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
And that acutely leads to common things like rashes, eczema flares, different itchy red changes in the skin. But long term, I do think there's a lot of data that will come out in the next 10 years that shows you pro-inflammatory foods like seed oils lead to premature aging and lead to skin cancer. We're only now at the tip of the iceberg in elucidating that in a lab.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
Yeah. Do you agree with that? Yeah. Hydrogenated soybean oils and safflower oils and canola oils, especially the hydrogenated versions, they tend to be a big problem. They're not meant to be consumed.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
I think we've turned into this society, which is, in my opinion, not the right direction that we're going, where we say, avoid the sun, avoid these foods, but take this pill to replace this mineral, take this pill to replace this vitamin. And somewhere along the line, we've kind of derailed ourselves.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
No, I have three kids trying to stop seed oils and their diet entirely is impossible. But can we avoid it? We cook mostly at home. I can avoid it. If we're going out and I don't know what's in it, will I lose sleep over it? Not really. But if it becomes their meal three times a day, seven days a week, then we got a problem. I think fundamentally all of medicine is that way. I think...
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
Patients with diabetes, if they have a slice of cake one time, will it destroy their body? No. But we know that over time, over many years, the chronic sugar increases and the insulin that's pumped out as a result will lead to downstream problems.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
But we know diabetes, just like skin cancer, just like anything else, is usually not in one time you did it and that's the end of it, unlike heart attacks and things like that. But I'm fine with it. I try to avoid them. But in the US, it's intertwined in literally everything. I mean, it's in everything.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
they're so intertwined in our food system it's going to take a few years for us to really figure out better options but at least the awareness is there so people can choose uh so that companies can start looking for better supply chain for sure man and you see this awareness is key and number one is just awareness of a problem that you didn't know existed whether it's something in medicine like awareness of cancer awareness of high blood pressure awareness of skin disease it's
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
awareness is the first thing. When you're blind to a lot of things that's going on, you take things for granted or you don't know and you can continue about your day. I think as we try to recorrect the course, I think we'll make an improvement in our kids' life. I grew up in the era of fruit roll-ups and gushers and the stuff that now we're like, how the heck could we give this to our kids?
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
But that's what I ate in the 90s. We didn't know any better. And we're okay now. I mean, I don't know what the future holds, but it's not that we're all dying and dropping dead. So I think I think fearmongering is a problem, but we do know that inflammatory foods, particularly seed oils, disrupt both the gut microbiome and disrupt immune homeostasis.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
That's the biggest problem that we will see what the long-term downstream effects are in modulating our body's immune balance. If our immune system cannot tolerate something, that's where a lot of disease comes from.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
Should you be in Panama getting a sunburn all the time, laying on the beach eight hours a day, five days a week? Probably not. Is getting 20 minutes of morning sun, 20 minutes of afternoon sun okay? I think it's totally fine. It makes you feel better. You look better. In fact, we use the sun and the sun's equivalent race to treat skin disease. So to say the sun is terrible I think is a bad idea.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
even skin cancer we know patients who have a weakened immune system have a 65 000 increase in skin cancer risk so it's not just the sun it's not just the diet but it's the myriad of all the things playing together besides uh just to touch on that besides medications that people might be on that lower their immune system because they're fighting one thing and they're lowering their immune system
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
Yes. Number one thing by far are obviously medications that are immunosuppressive and illnesses that are immune. I don't want to say immunosuppressive illnesses, but immune deficient illnesses. For example? Yeah. You know, the most common one that we think of is, you know, HIV. Okay, got it.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
And there's other conditions, autoimmune conditions, you know, lupus, things like that, that affect or modulate your immune system, have some weakening of immune surveillance.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
Yeah, with autoimmune diseases, basically our body doesn't know what is bad and what is normal, so it fights the wrong thing. That's all autoimmune disease is, is it mistakes self or it mistakes normal for bad, and it fights that. So medications, autoimmune diseases, immunodeficient states, things like that. But I do think our diet...
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
has a huge role in implicating immune weakness or some sort of relative immune deficiency. And that's what a lot of people who are so, so strict about, you know, seed oil avoidance and holistic diets and things like that are touching upon without knowing that that's what they're alluding to is that chronic disease we think is an immune problem.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
It's a metabolic and immune problem, whether it's diabetes, whether it's cancer, cancer, all organ system cancers. It's thought to be a metabolic and an immune system problem, which is why actually the Nobel Prize in 2018 was given to the drugs that unleash the immune system to fight cancer. And so now we're just understanding that.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
And the question, the big question, which I don't have the answer to, and I don't know if anybody does, is how can you modulate your immune system through lifestyle and diet? Right. And we have little ideas.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
We have thoughts of certain supplements, you know, that actually the Indian diet, the herbs and supplements that are used in Indian cooking are one of the most potent ways that you can modulate your immune system for the better. But we're now just understanding diet, lifestyle, you know, environment and ways to improve our immune system.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
That's not just go to the doctor, get this pill, go to the doctor, get this injection.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
Now – Why do dermatologists make a big stink about the sun?
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
100%.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
And I would probably put the sun maybe in a B. I think it's good for you, man. I think too much is a problem, but I think it's good for you. And the reason we make a big stink, and a lot of people won't talk to you about this, but there is no evidence, not a single shred of evidence that sun avoidance... will protect you from our most lethal forms of skin cancer.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
I'd put that as an F. As an F. As an F. Intentional tanning, I'd put that as an F. Intentional tanning.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
And they're overdoing it. Yep. We always want what we don't have. In Asian societies, the caste always wants fairer skin because it relates to higher social stature and royalty. And fair-skinned individuals, they always want that Mediterranean olive glow. So we're always chasing things that we can't have. But the Palm Springs, Florida, retirement community look is a big no-no.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
Your body is struggling. Your skin is struggling. Don't do that. You're eventually going to be my patient. But I think your body's natural ability to produce color because you're doing things normally without the intention of burning to a crisp or tanning, I think is fine. I think tanning beds, intentional tanning, F. There's no reason to do it. Absolutely no reason.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
Probably put it as a C. As a C. OK, great. There are pros to coffee. There are some questionable cons to coffee. I'll tell you what we know from the science. So coffee, majority of the time we drink it for the caffeine content, not the flavor. Some people drink the decaf for the flavor, but generally most of the Americans in the world drink it for its cognitive boosting. It wakes you up.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
The caffeine is great. I love coffee. I drink a ton of it myself, and I drink more of it as more kids I have. The thing that we know about caffeine is caffeine is a mild diuretic and a vasoconstrictor. So at higher doses tends to constrict the tiny vessels that feed skin, the tiny vessels that feed certain parts of our body.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
Drew, thanks for having me. I don't know if I feel that I'm worthy of those words, but I appreciate it. I love what I do, and I've dedicated my career to that. So thank you for having me. It's going to be a lot of fun, a lot of things to talk about. I know skin's always hot, and that's why I chose that as a career, but thank you.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
It's also a diuretic, but very mildly, which means it makes you pee a little bit more, which in theory could dehydrate you. It's not enough for us to see in most people and the amount that they consume a really big gradient difference in skin hydration status. So the premise that coffee dries you out or makes your skin a little bit more dry is not really the case. Now, some people are sensitive.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
to caffeine metabolic byproducts. So what their body does in compensation is actually will produce more oil in response. And I'm one of those people, and I see this all the time, is after, you know, by midday, caffeine consumption will increase the amount of oil I put out.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
My skin's oilier, my forehead's shinier, my nose is shinier, and it tends to be more of a compensatory response than anything. We know that it used to be thought that caffeine would make people flush a little bit more or make their rosacea worse or make their acne worse. And now we've actually figured out it's not the coffee itself, but it's the temperature of the beverage.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
So iced coffees, caffeine tablets, if you're into that stuff, don't do the same thing. So if you tend to have rosacea, that kind of redness that flushes in the sun with emotions and beverage and spicy foods, it's not the coffee, it's the temperature of the coffee you're drinking.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
In fact, there is no evidence that avoiding the sun results in a decrease in skin cancer specific deaths. The reason dermatologists and doctors make a big deal about that is I can't control your genetic predisposition. I can't control your family history, your personal history, things that your genes are going to do. So what I can control is environmental insults.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
I think in my personal opinion, I'd probably actually put coffee a little bit higher than a C, maybe a B because of all the good things that it has. Okay, it gets a little bit of a bump. It gets a little bit of a bump as the more I think about this. But just like with anything, overdoing it's a problem, right?
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
So if you're having 1,200 milligrams of caffeine a day from coffee consumption, it's not going to be good for you. It's not going to be good for your nervous system, not going to be good for your kidney filtration system, not going to be good for your skin. If you're having a relatively normal amount, normal is a range in the world, anywhere from 100 to 400 milligrams a day.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
Which is usually like a cup or two. Yeah, a cup or two, though in the US, our food system is wild in that we hybrid make the beans. Starbucks beans are engineered to produce more caffeine than any other bean. Oh, interesting. Yeah, that's a totally different story.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
But I think if you're having the normal amount of coffee and if you're having relatively good quality coffee without like the Dunkin' Donuts, 70 scoops of sugar in there, the polyphenols, the antioxidants that come with it are a good thing. I tend to drink my coffee black because it's on a mission. It's going to do its thing. It's going to wake me up and get me going.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
I think I would put it as a B. I don't think it has any deleterious effects on the skin that we should be concerned about.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
Nothing wrong with it.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
Yeah.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
Yeah.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
So it's the only cancer that's still increasing in incidence.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
Every year on year. Every year on year. And there's so many things to talk about on that. You bring up, you know, antioxidants. And to backtrack, and I know, I think I'm jumping around even more than you are. Spray sunscreens, I would put as an F. Oh, wow. Spray sunscreens, you know, the stuff you buy at, you know, regular drugstore that you see in the spray bar, F by far.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
I think sunscreens as an umbrella, I'd probably put as a C. As a C, but that includes... Sprays, F.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
So the mineral, pure mineral, safe. Those are safe. I put those as an A, the sprays put as an F. So collectively we'll come as a C, but sprays avoid.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
And again, why is that? There's two reasons. One, you never get enough. coverage that you you see as the spf label on the bottle that's number one sprays tend to be chemical sunscreens which the chemical ingredients are now being shown to be endocrine disruptors and also some of their breakdown products are carcinogens and number three the majority of the spray sunscreens use a propellant
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
And the propellants tend to be benzene derivatives. So you're inhaling benzene as well as a lot of these chemical sunscreens. There's been many class action lawsuits for spray sunscreens because of the consequences to them. Even if the sunscreen is not chemical, it's a mineral, your inhalational hazards for minerals as a spray is a problem. So just avoid the sprays altogether.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
And that's why we make such a big stink about the sun, because I can say, okay, I don't know what's going to happen to your skin, but at least I can control an outside insult that's coming in. That's too much UV. So I wouldn't put it as an F, though most of my colleagues would. I'd probably put it as a B, you know?
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
I tend to avoid them for two reasons. Number one, you don't know what the propellant is that gets the spray out. Is it compressed air or is it an actual propellant that tends to be in the benzene category? Nobody in their right mind should be breathing in benzene as a way to protect another organ.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
And number two, inhalation of micronized minerals, zinc and titanium, can have consequences long-term in the lungs. You've got to remember, we're telling people... to use sunscreen for 40, 50, 60 years of their life, the problem won't be the one-time use. The problem will be the daily use over 40 years. It's so hard to gather that type of data.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
And we digress a little bit, but I just want to explain how mineral versus chemical sunscreens work, because when you know that, it kind of makes you a little bit more concerned as a consumer. Mineral sunscreens tend to act as a shield. Think of a metal shield on the skin and they tend to bounce off UV rays and sometimes they absorb them and they just hold them on the surface of the skin.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
But it's supposed to because it's actually a shield against it. Exactly. It acts as a cast or a shield. Chemical sunscreens, the way they work is they have to absorb the energy of the UV, undergo a chemical transformation in your skin, and then release that UV energy as heat. So the way chemical sunscreens work is they are undergoing chemical reactions biologically on your skin. Big question.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
Is this normal? Is this not? Is this safe? Long-term, 40 years of using this, is this a problem? And I tend to be on the side of no chemical sunscreens. I don't recommend it. I don't carry it in my practice.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
Exactly. Exactly. In the 80s and 90s, sunscreen was predominantly the white, you know, 1980s lifeguard nose, chalky zinc oxide.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
The problem is you can't wear makeup over that very easily. It goes on cakey. It goes on gritty. You look like you have sandpaper on your face. So, cosmeceutical companies said, okay, how can we make a different form of chemical, tend to be organic or phenol-based chemicals, That will go on smoothly so that people who want to wear makeup on top won't see this gritty chalkiness.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
And that's how chemical sunscreens came to be. The problem is it's now after 20, 30 years of data, we're saying the stuff we claimed in the FDA's 1999 study is generally recognized as safe and effective. is no longer safe and effective.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
Yeah. And sunscreens are an interesting thing. They're actually drugs. They're controlled by the FDA. They're considered over-the-counter drugs. So you can't just make yourself a sunscreen. It's a controlled substance. The FDA has to approve it. You have to show that it does the things that it does in very, very elegant studies.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
The original manuscript that defined all the stuff we saw in Myrtle Beach and Florida and all the Palm Springs and everything that you saw, Coppertone and a banana boat and Sunbum and stuff that you saw in stores were defined in 1999 in the original manuscript. And there was 19 or 20 chemicals in that list. Now, I think 12 of them are considered not safe.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
In fact, two of them are pulled out of all the European Union because we know that when they break down in the skin, the breakdown product, benzophenone, is a well-known carcinogen. Yeah. Crazy.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
Yeah, exactly. That's nuts. That's nuts.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
Great question. So my favorite forms for antioxidants... I tend to like a few specific ones. I tend to like vitamin C. It's a huge one in skin. Topical and like through food? Topical and food. And oral. It can be oral supplementation and it can be both as a topical form.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
As a topical form, the simplest study that you can do is take an apple, cut it in half, put a little bit of orange juice on one side or a crushed up vitamin C tablet and leave the other side untouched. Leave it out for a day. See what happens. The untreated side turns brown. The treated side stays nice and crisp and healthy. Same concept on your skin when you apply it topically.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
It's a great form of protection from environmental pollutants. When we consume it, it's obviously an amazing antioxidant internally. It's also the most essential thing that your body needs to produce collagen. Without vitamin C, you cannot make collagen. It doesn't matter whether you take supplements, you eat all the protein you want in the world.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
Without vitamin C, your teeth will fall out, your hair will fall out, everything will fall out. I actually see probably twice or three times a year patients with scurvy.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
Great question. I saw it in New York City. I see it here. Very restrictive diets and lifestyles and religious beliefs.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
You know, we've seen it in patients with carnivore diets. They have very restrictive diets that avoid all sources of vitamin C, and then other people who are food avoidant for other personal or religious beliefs. Usually I see this in patients, and it's very rare, but you still see it a couple times a year in the big cities, is people who have a very specific white diet.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
So I'm going to phrase it in a couple different ways.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
They're only eating rice and white bread, or they're only eating potatoes and starches, and they have no form of vitamin C, and they come in, their gums are bleeding, they have what we call corkscrew hairs, or the hairs are starting to twist and bleed into the skin. Oh, wow. Yeah, and you're like, hey, have a little orange, or have a vitamin C, and they correct. Yeah. So that's my number one.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
There's many forms of skin cancer. The three most common that we see in the world are basal cell carcinoma, squamous cell carcinoma, and melanoma. It's what I've dedicated my career to treating as well as some of the rarer types. There's no evidence that sun protection, strict sun protection, decreases your likelihood from dying from metastatic melanoma or metastatic squamous cell carcinoma.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
If I got to pick one antioxidant, probably vitamin C. There's two close next ones. The next one I like astaxanthin. I think it's an under-talked-about antioxidant that it's not common in the derm world. We don't know why, but it's really common in the wellness and functional world. There's a lot of good data showing it has really good antioxidant properties.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
You usually find it in things like microalgae, krill, shrimp, salmon. But we actually have done several studies in skin and it shows that it improves skin appearance objectively by 30%. Elasticity, hydration status, fine lines and wrinkles, signs of aging. And it's an easy supplement that can be consumed. You can have it in your diet. You can take it as a supplement. So I love astaxanthin.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
And another antioxidant that I absolutely love, and these are isolated forms, you know, not like you get a myriad of compounds when you eat blueberries or pomegranates or raspberries, but isolated antioxidants. I love nicotinamide or niacinamide. And it's a B vitamin derivative that has been shown as an antioxidant to allow your skin to correct DNA damage from the sun.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
And this has been shown both in laboratory studies, animal studies, and human studies. In fact, there was a landmark study that just supplemented patients only with nicotinamide, which is a B3 derivative, nothing else. And their cancer risk dropped by 30%. Wow. Their skin cancer risk.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
A thousand milligrams a day or 500 twice a day.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
There's topical products. So they help improve complexion. They help improve redness from the same anti- But it's probably hard to get that same dosage. Yeah, yeah. And the correction, the DNA correction that is needed is from the inside out. So the oral supplements.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
But we know patients who eat the full rainbow diet, the antioxidant diet, the anti-inflammatory diet, they have a reduced risk of skin disease. They have improved...
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
skin tolerance immune tolerance of the skin we know that they're they're inflammatory things like eczema and psoriasis tends to improve so antioxidants s you cannot go wrong nobody will ever say hey you ate too many good foods you know i love it yeah i love it all right we got it on s yeah i want to give a little shout out to a project that you're involved in yeah
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
I'm biased. This is a product called Sun Powder. It's the first daily drinkable skincare supplement. It's the first supplement of its kind to protect and repair your skin from the inside out. I describe it, and the simplest way to describe it is think of it as AG1 for your skin. Got it. And I'm biased.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
I will rank it as an S, but I will tell you why I would rank it as an S because any other dermatologist, and you're going to see some dermatologists in the near future talk about this across the United States, would rank it as an S as well for several reasons. Number one, there's nothing out there like it.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
It's the most comprehensive package for skin health that's taken once a day as a powder that's mixed into water. It originally came from a necessity for our skin cancer patients. We had a high-risk clinic when I did my training at Stanford that had patients with innumerable skin cancers. And I ran a high-risk clinic over at UCLA where I was a professor.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
And we looked at ways that we can protect patients' skin. That was not just tell them to wear sunscreen because God knows these patients were avoidant of the sun and they would still get numerous skin cancers. And some of them, you know, disfiguring cosmetically or functionally. So we looked for a way to reduce their risk.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
In fact, the most lethal forms of these cancers arise in sun protected skin. the most lethal forms of squamous cell carcinomas don't even have the UV mutation signatures that we see in kind of more garden variety sun damaged skin cancers.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
And in doing so, we also looked for a way, well, if we're doing that, how else can we improve the quality and appearance and the health of your skin? So I partnered with my colleague over from Harvard. He's a cosmetic dermatologist who practices in Miami. And his patients are a little bit different than mine.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
You know, 80% of my patients are skin cancer patients and probably 20% are cosmetic and regular. His are 100% cosmetic. So he had a need. for keeping patients' skin healthy and making sure whatever they did would maintain.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
If you do all these amazing things for your skin, you spend all this money and you get a beautiful, youthful complexion, you go back out in Miami Beach in a week, you're gonna get all that stuff come back and you're like, what the did I do?
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
So we formulated a product called Sunpowder that has eight clinically studied ingredients in the doses that was studied in the published journals that not only protect you from sunburns, it reduces the likelihood of you getting a burn while outside, meaning it increases the time you can spend outside before your skin turns red. Now, it's not a replacement to sunscreen.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
I want to make that clear, but it works in addition. It's an internal form of protection. It helps reduce your skin cancer risk. So we published that data and looked at over 500 patients who had two or more skin cancers in the past. And when they took the active ingredient for a year, which is nicotinamide at 1,000 milligrams, their skin cancer risk reduced by up to 30%.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
The ingredient that helped reduce sunburn risk is this fern from the Amazon rainforest called polypodium. And when consumed, and we're running a clinical trial right now in my practice and another clinical trial in Miami, when consumed, shields your skin from turning red from too much UV exposure. So I can take it, surf, go out and swim, do all the things that I do.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
And it allows me to be in the sun longer before my skin says, hey, hey, like I'm starting to burn. Take it easy.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
Yeah, right. I usually take it about two hours before. It's in my morning mix. I'll mix it in my smoothie, drink it, and then I go. Ironically, the times that I need sun protection the most are the times that I can't apply. I'm either in the water, I'm hiking, I forgot to bring it, I'm skiing. I just don't think of – I shouldn't say this.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
I don't think to apply or reapply when I'm out on a mountain and I've gotten – Some of my worst sunburns when I'm skiing, ironically. And then there's other ingredients. We put a full dose of astaxanthin in there. There's bioactive collagen peptides with vitamin C. There's hyaluronic acid, which is the stuff common cosmetic fillers are made of. It hydrates the skin. There's biotin.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
Now, it's not to say that sun doesn't cause them, but there's so many other factors that don't go into that category that I think saying sun avoidance means you will not get this is absolutely not true. In fact, most of my patients that
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
There's a lot of great ingredients in one single scoop. It was a lot of work in the making originally dedicated to our patients. So I said, there's nothing there besides telling patients, avoid the sun, wear sunscreen and see you later, buddy. So we said, why don't we find out a way to improve the skin? It's been an awesome venture.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
Yeah, sunpowder.co. It's our website. It has all the published data. We have a social media handle on Instagram. It's drinksunpowder. There's a TikTok called drinksunpowder. And the social media handles show skin cancers and lasers. And there's a lot of skin education. It's not a page about selling supplements. I think the supplement world is very saturated.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
But there's amazing data that's evidence-based in all the ingredients in this.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
Thank you.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
to these diseases, and I have a very unique practice, and I see the worst of the worst probably in Los Angeles, most of my patients, including my young patients that have very bad outcomes, they're not sun-related tumors.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
Yeah, so to take a... You know, a bird's eye view of that statement. In the U.S., we tend to be more reactionary to our health care than proactive. And that's across all specialties. We tend not to see the doctor until there's something that needs to be treated, as opposed to seeing the provider for preventative or screening measures. And that's not just skin. It's every organ system.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
I love skin screenings because it's probably the least invasive screening of any body system possible. So I put screenings as an A, and I'll tell you why. If you go see your regular primary care doc, And they're going to see how you're doing. You're going to get a blood draw just to see your basic lab functions. I don't even poke you when you come to the office. I just see your skin.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
It takes five minutes for me to examine, maybe a couple minutes less, a couple minutes more for me to examine every square inch of your skin. And it's just by looking. And we are trained to know what should be there, what shouldn't be there. It's not like getting a colonoscopy. We're getting to the age where we need to do things like colonoscopies. And heaven knows that's much more invasive.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
And that's a simple screening. Smokers and their CT scans for their lungs. So it's the least invasive screening of all body systems to detect cancer and things that shouldn't be there. So why not do it? Once a year is all you need for pretty much everybody. And
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
maybe even every other year, if you have absolutely no family history and you have no personal history and your skin's doing fine, maybe even every other year, but it's a five minute check. Any particular age where you recommend that people get started on that? Yeah, I tend to like, well, it depends on family history like we talked about.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
If you have a very, very strong family history of melanoma, I tend to recommend at the beginning of puberty. Moles change with puberty, particularly progesterone hormones. So as you go through puberty, you will make new moles, your moles will change, and that's something that a good dermatologist should be able to survey.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
If you don't have a family history or personal history of melanoma or any other form of skin cancer, then I think after puberty, adulthood, somewhere around 18, once a year is just an easy way to upkeep and monitor your skin. And what I like about screenings is
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
just like any cancer in the body whether it's breast prostate lung colon skin anything else early detection dictates better outcomes so when you catch things early doesn't matter whether it's a melanoma or a lung cancer or a prostate or breast cancer the earlier you catch it the more likely you're going to cure it right so we make a big stink about oh i went to the dermatologist they biopsied something small on my nose i tend to see the consequence of the things that haven't been done
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
Now I'm taking off an entire nose. I'm taking off an entire ear. Or worse yet, we're talking about this thing is now in the neck or in the lungs or cats out the bag. So I love screenings. Ironically, you bring up screenings. Tomorrow, I'll be screening all the firefighters that were implicated in the Pasadena-Altadena fires. Wow. For just a screening exam.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
Yeah, melanomas are historically been our most lethal form of skin cancer. Bob Marley died of it. Jimmy Carter famously survived. It was in his brain. The most common place that they show up is the back of men and the lower legs of women. Why do you think that is? There's genetic factors and genetic mutations that occur that partly are hereditary, partly sporadic, meaning they just they happen.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
These guys, there's over 250 firefighters we're going to see tomorrow. And these guys have an occupational hazard and many of them don't know that. And it's such an easy thing that I can do that I can set this up at the fire academy and screen them there. No other organ system will allow you to do that. You have to go to the doctor's office. You have to get a blood draw.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
Even screening for diabetes, you have to get a poke to see what your blood sugar is. Here, I can go to the patient. I can tell them about, hey, you're outside fighting fires. You're keeping us safe and healthy. The Palisades, Malibu, you guys are outside all the time. Here's a hazard. Here's something that you guys should watch out for. And let me just take a look at your skin.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
Greatest thing, we catch something. Worst thing, I wasted five minutes of your time.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
Right.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
No, I think any good medical dermatologist in this day and age should be able to screen you. Unfortunately, in a lot of big cities, things have migrated more towards cosmetics and... cosmetic dermatology. So if you're looking for a screening, any good medical dermatologist should be able to do that. Unfortunately, you're right.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
There is a little bit of a gatekeeping, meaning oftentimes there's a wait that's several months for some providers. And if you need to see something urgent, see your primary doc at least first, as opposed to waiting six months for something that could be a problem. But if you have no concerns and you're just going in for a screening, any good dermatologist should be able to do that.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
F. That doesn't mean I don't consume it. Okay, got it. But it's an F. There's no amount of alcohol that's good for you. No amount. That being said, it is something that's socially consumed and to an extent over-consumed. But from a skin standpoint and a biology standpoint, it's a toxin, right? And alcohol itself is broken down into a metabolite called acetaldehyde.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
Unfortunately, luck of the draw. That's why a majority of these melanomas occur. Now we say, OK, don't go outside and get added mutations to your skin, which is too much UV. But we know, in fact, that these these bad sun naive areas, the tumors are not they don't have a sun signature.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
which is what creates a lot of the problems in the skin. So first, alcohol tends to be a mild diuretic, which is why when you start to drink, you feel like you got to go to the bathroom more, or at the bar, you're like, oh, I started to pee, and there it goes. It's because there's actually a diuretic effect. So number one, tends to dry you out.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
And that becomes a problem, especially the next day, because we tend to wake up and our body's trying to overcompensate by holding on to the water we peed out. So you wake up with puffy eyes, that hangover look, there's an actual biologic change related to the alcohol that was consumed in your skin that makes you look like , which is the hangover look.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
As a result, we tend to overcompensate for that dryness by producing more sebum, so more oil, more likelihood for breakouts. Our skin isn't that happy as a result of the secondary changes that occur from alcohol's mild diuretic properties. So that's number one. Which is why you always look funny or you have puffy bags under your eyes is the fluid shifts that occur from alcohol consumption.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
Number two, the acetaldehyde is a toxin. And some populations, particularly Asians, have no ability to break down the acetaldehyde, so it collects in their skin. There's this thing we incorrectly call the Asian glow, and there's a reason for that. The acetaldehyde actually accumulates and dilates blood vessels in the skin.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
There used to be what was thought as the sailor's nose or the drinker's nose in which patients would have really big vessels on the nose and the nose was growing, the pores were growing, the nose itself was growing too much. And they thought that that was due to too much alcohol consumption.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
We now know it's mostly due to a condition called rosacea or rhinophyma as a result of rosacea, but there's some truth to that. Alcohol and acetaldehyde accumulate and vasodilate the skin, so you looked flushed, you looked redder. You can even get that surprised or shocked look when you're drinking and your face is flushed, and that's because your body doesn't like the metabolite.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
There's no good amount of alcohol that is safe or healthy for your skin. We know it's a consequence during surgery and procedures. It makes you bleed more. It slows down wound healing. So if you're undergoing any sort of cosmetic surgery, reconstructive surgery, or even a cosmetic procedure, we avoid alcohol because of its blood thinning properties and bruising properties.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
So there's a lot of problems with alcohol and not very many good benefits. Now, Do I enjoy a glass of wine or a cocktail? I do. Do I try to avoid it? I do. I think if I pick my alcohols, I tend to pick ones that at least come with some theorized benefit, which tend to be the red wines and things like that. But for skin, I put it as an F.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
Yeah, yeah. Grain-based alcohols for several reasons. One, the volume we tend to consume is a problem. And number two, it tends to be inflammatory. So grain-based alcohols will cause an inflammatory shift in our diet and our skin's immune response. We know that it flares certain... Skin diseases, eczema, psoriasis will get worse when patients are constantly consuming grain-based alcohols.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
So I don't want people to feel guilted that they went out in 1992, went to a beach vacation in Virginia Beach or something, and that's the cause of their skin cancer. In fact, there was a very large study in 1999 published in one of our most incredible journals that looked at sunscreen versus no sunscreen use, diligent sun protection versus none,
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
And then it basically acts as a seed oil equivalent. I tend not to like them. So that's like a whiskey, barley.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
yeah or yeah yeah beers you know beers um certain vodkas certain whiskeys colored whiskeys you know they tend to be very inflammatory and you see both the acute problems and the downstream problems people with certain gluten intolerances and gluten intolerance has become this unfortunate catch-all in the us everybody who eats a pizza and gets an upset stomach says they're gluten intolerant
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
But true gluten intolerance, like celiac disease, these grain alcohols wreak havoc on the immune system. So I tend to avoid them.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
Okay. B. Maybe an A. Maybe an A. Maybe an A. Maybe, depending. We have to see a little bit more data. It was five years ago, a D to most dermatologists. Yeah. And data started to come out more and more and randomized trials have come out more and more and it bumped it up from a C to a B. There's some benefit. The problem is it's such a broad spectrum to use the term red light.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
There are devices that are battery-powered. There are devices that are AC-powered. There are devices that have high density of lights. There are devices that have low density of lights. The joule outputs vary from product to product. So the overall encatchment is broad, and it's hard to control for the, you know,
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
shitty products out there and hard to account for the the ones that are good i like it i have it in my practice we use it post-operatively for certain things like when we do injections for hair we will use red light that's powered right typically that's a what is that like a cap Or is that like a medical light? Yeah, we tend to use the medical light.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
It's a three-panel light that we shine on the scalp. We also use it post-laser procedure, especially if we're doing ablative lasers where we're destroying the top layer of skin intentionally. We will use the red light to speed up wound healing. There's some good data that shows that it increases vascularity and blood flow, which is how it works to improve wound healing and anti-aging.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
So I like it. It's a B. It could be an A if we have enough data that comes out and we see which specific devices and energies are needed to get those effects reproducibly. But just like when anything is good in the market, you get a flood of products that are inferior or don't work and things like that. And that's a problem. But I give red light a good B.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
Radio frequency microneedling, I will put as an F. Okay. Microneedling, I will put as an A. Okay, great. Huge difference, right? Huge difference. So we're tapping into the world of... things that you can do to your skin to improve its appearance and health. And that's light-based devices, energy-based devices, mechanical-based devices, things like that.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
And the incidence, meaning the number of these cancers, of basal cell carcinoma, which is our most common cancer in the world, one in four Americans will get this, there was no difference between the groups. So it scratched our heads saying, hey, we've been saying, like, avoid the sun like the plague, you know, dress like a beekeeper, don't go out in the sun, don't do this stuff.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
Why I don't like radiofrequency microneedling? Several reasons. Number one, radio frequency treats a whole different part of the skin than does microneedling. Microneedling, the general depth that it can penetrate at most is somewhere around two and a half millimeters. And when we use microneedling, our goal is to stimulate collagen induction through making microscopic pokes in the skin.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
That's what it does. And it does it without heat. The beauty of microneedling is its mechanical injury, not heat injury. So historically, ethnic skin like yourself, myself, you know, African-American skin, what have you, could not tolerate a lot of laser devices. The heat would destroy the cells that produces our skin color, the melanocytes.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
So we could do all these things amazingly in white skin, and it was studied in white skin, but ethnic skin, we're like, yeah, you can't use this laser, you can't use this laser, etc., etc. We have nothing for you. Microneedling came about.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
It's actually an old technique, very popular in India and the Middle East that was around for many, many years and caught popularity in the US more recently as a way to induce collagen without heat, but mechanical injury. So now we have a way to improve scars, to improve texture. Radio frequency is heat that's deposited in a layer below where the microneedle reaches.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
And the problem with radio frequency is it falls in this like ambiguous, doesn't work really great zone. It's not deep enough to cause tightening in the fat layer. And it's not shallow enough to get the benefits that we're looking for things that treat the top layer of skin. So what I see often is it's
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
You know, whenever you get something that is too good to be true, they say it treats everything or it does everything, you should start to question it. Like, does it really treat scars and redness and blemish and wrinkles and fine lines and brown spots? Can't really do that. You start to see the consequences.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
And the biggest area where I see a lot of patients with problems with radiofrequency microneedling is in ethnic skin, where they come in with... Stamp or pigmentary changes. So you see the heat from the radiofrequency caused skin color changes because their body couldn't tolerate the heat. Microneedling alone, amazing.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
Love it for acne scars, love it for scar revision, love it for texture changes that we can improve. Radiofrequency, combining them, too much injury in the skin, too high of a risk, F.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
But we couldn't solve for this difference. So there's a lot of factors that go into it. Now, I'm not saying... I'm not saying do the stuff you see online where people are tanning their perineum and their butthole. That's like not the thing to do. But if you enjoy the sun and you can do it without burning, I think that's fine. I think you feel good.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
And to simplify things even better, all of these energy-based devices are made to target one thing. They target a certain either depth or color. All lasers understand is color.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
So when somebody tells you this device will target a myriad of things as a provider, and we do a ton of lasers, usually my Fridays or my cosmetic surgery or cosmetic days, we do a ton of lasers and we have a myriad of devices. You know that the best devices only target one thing, but they do an excellent job at it. It's like...
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
You know, a car, if you're saying a car, your car can haul lumber, can tow a boat, can also race around the track and can also take eight people. And as a sports car, you're like, that doesn't make any sense. It's either a pickup truck or a sports car or a sedan. It's one of those things. Same thing with lasers and energy-based devices. They target a specific part or a color in the skin.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
So I tend to shy away from things like radiofrequency microneedling when they claim it can do all these things. shitty job at doing all of them. And in fact, the consequences outweigh the benefits, particularly in ethnic skin.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
Yeah, yeah, 100%. Jack of all trades, master of none.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
If I were to pick one device and one device only, and I have no affiliation with any medical device out there, so I'm not speaking with a bias. And most dermatologists will agree with this. If I were to pick one device, it's the Fraxel device. And it's basically fractionated non-ablative resurfacing. And this... Is it a laser? It's a laser.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
And we love this laser. It's been around for a long time because it does three things, and it does it remarkably well. Number one, it improves sun damage, so sunspots, browns, wrinkling. It improves fine lines and wrinkles by stimulating collagen. And more importantly, at least to me, more recently, we found that it decreases cancer risk when it's done yearly by up to 50%.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
And we knew this for the past 10 years, 15 years that the device has been around, that patients who would get this laser resurfacing done for their face they had less sun damage, less cancerous changes, and less skin cancer. But now the Harvard study last year validated that in a beautiful study that looked at patients who got Fraxel treatment and their skin cancer risk dropped by 50%.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
Yeah, yeah. And to go into that, and I can assure you, almost every one of your favorite dermatologists has had Fraxel or wants to do Fraxel to their skin. It's the gold standard, in my opinion. The way it works is the laser drills microscopic holes
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
to a certain depth of the skin targeting a certain region of the skin without destroying the top layer so and this is the elegance of lasers is it provides heat based destruction to a certain depth let's say the sun damage brown spot, the freckles that are from longstanding sun, fine lines and wrinkles as a result of collagen breakdown in that area, while leaving the surface untouched.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
So you don't have weeping, bleeding wounds that you used to see from... Other older lasers, CO2 laser being a popular one in the 80s and 90s and 2000s, your skin is not raw when you go home. You don't have any open wounds, but your skin starts to peel in the week and you look amazing. If I were to pick one device and only have that, that would be it.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
Yeah, by targeting that layer of the skin in which sun damage accumulates, it turns that skin over. So all that damaged skin sloughs off within a week. So the skin on the surface now is healthier and younger. And we actually studied this up at Stanford where we took biopsy samples of skin that was treated with these wavelengths of light and looked at the genes. And before...
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
laser treatment and after laser treatment there was a shift back to more youthful gene activation in the skin so it's not just the appearance it's biologically younger it's biologically healthier so it's helping your skin do what it does naturally just accelerating the process yeah and getting rid of you know all the gunk that's been accumulated from sun I love this device.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
Yeah, treatments, you know, and most docs, I don't know why they don't talk about costs, whereas everything else is transparent. I think it's silly. The discussion about costs is it's widely variable, right, depending on what is done, what device is used, if there's additional things done. But it falls somewhere in the $1,000 range. Maybe it's a little bit more in certain cities.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
Usually per treatment. Okay, got it. Somewhere around there, maybe $1,200, maybe $1,500, maybe a little bit less, but somewhere in the $1,000, $1,500 range. As somebody who runs these lasers all day and night in our practice, I tend not to like packages. I think just treating the patient, seeing how they respond after one treatment, a tailored approach is the best way to do it.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
You may not need a package. You may come in and say, hey, doc, I'm tired of looking like this. What can we do? We come up with a tailored approach and we say, hey, let's try one. If you need it again, then we'll do it again at this time point. If you need it again down the line, we'll do it again. But I think kind of a customized, personalized approach is the way to do it.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
I think packages are very common in things like med spas and things like that. People do Botox. Yeah, and that helps the bottom dollar. It helps you save a few bucks. But I think when you're doing things like laser resurfacing of your face or kind of these more elegant or complicated treatments, I think it's a one step at a time.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
Usually it's like once a year, if anything. Last time my wife did it was like two years ago.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
And obviously what concerns you will dictate what device is used, right? Like if you come in and say, hey, I'm like, I hate this redness. Every time I'm talking, I'm at a social event, I flush, you know, this redness bothers me. It looks like I'm embarrassed, but I'm not. You know, I have spicy foods. My cheeks turn red. There's a different device for that.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
Fraxel will do absolutely nothing for that, but there's a device called the V-beam laser that I use to treat the redness. So what bothers you will dictate what the best... device or treatment option is. And we do a ton of surgery, but what I've noticed is people are falling, especially in the big cities, falling out of favor for things that have a lot of downtime. We live a 24 seven lifestyle.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
Yeah, particularly the life-threatening ones.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
We want, we want our results. We want it immediately. And we want nobody to know that we had it and we don't want it to slow us down. Right. And we can't really achieve that, but you know, a traditional facelift has downtime. And the results are remarkable when done right. You look markedly younger, but it's surgery. It's redraping your face.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
It's making incisions and repositioning things the way they need to. So come with it, the consequences and the cost. Now, I'm not knocking facelifts. I love it. They are an amazing product. But the younger and younger patients, I think, in my opinion, shouldn't be jumping straight to surgery. I think it's nonsense to have 20, 30, early 40-year-olds coming in for big surgeries.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
So if we're looking at look, I'm going to play devil's advocate a little bit on my own words. Sure. Sun protection takes a little bit of a bigger role. If we're looking for aesthetic improvement or protection, then some form of sun protection consistently is key, whether it's a broad-brimmed hat, whether it's some sort of shade or sunscreen. That's very easy to do.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
Yeah, I have a pragmatic approach. Trying to avoid the sun day in and day out to make you look younger actually makes you look weirder. So I think, obviously, midday sun, summertime, you'll want a little bit more protection. I 100% agree. Follow the UV index, look at the weather pattern, look what you're going to do during the day, and then decide.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
bless my heart, my wife's heart, but she isn't a big sunscreen fan. You know, she just doesn't like it. She forgets to put it on. You know, she's always lived this. She has olive skin. She's always had the ability to tolerate the sun well. So to get this new thing into her lifestyle has been hard. She's like, you know, my skin looks great. Why do I need sunscreen? She's not wrong.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
She's, she's onto something because clearly it's helped her this far, but She's only going to get older. She's not going to get any younger. So we make small lifestyle changes. Maybe now that you're going out to the park for baseball, honey, wear sunscreen or wear a hat. You like hats? Great. You know, you weren't 20. You're not going to be 20 forever.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
Should we clip this and put it on social media?
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
That'll be the end of that. But those are simple tweaks that you can make as you see your body change. The other simplest thing is a retinal, a prescription retinoid. Every dermatologist's secret, it's a simple, effective way to improve the quality, appearance, and health of your skin.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
It's the only medicine that we have, and it's the active forms of a prescription, and I'll go into that in just a second, but it's the only medicine we have That has been shown to reverse the biologic age of our body when it's applied. It's freaking amazing. And it's just a cream.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
So it looks like you're well-versed on the retinoids. And the reason for that is the sunlight inactivates tretinoin, which is the most common prescription retinoid that we give. It's not that you can't wear it in the sun. When you get a lot of UV on the medicine, the medicine becomes an inactive form. So you've wasted the efficacy. It's not that you'll have a problem.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
You should not use it if you're trying to conceive or become pregnant. But that data comes from the oral version of this cream, which is Accutane. There isn't strong data to show that. And the reason I'm saying this is I don't want people who are trying to conceive to all of a sudden freak out because they've been using some retin-A and now they're like, oh my God, am I going to have a problem?
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
But because it's the same medicine, same drug, we assume that you will get some absorption from the cream, which means you will have the same consequences. So avoid it during pregnancy, pregnancy. or conception time. You can use it while you're breastfeeding. And this is a common misconception. Women think you cannot use it while you're breastfeeding. Absolutely no problem.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
You can use retinoids all you want while you're breastfeeding. The problem is a developing fetus. It can affect the development of a fetus.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
Yeah.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
Yeah. What you're describing is a form of acne scarring called ice pick scars. They're like essentially like an old ice pick that poked your skin. And that's a result of inflammatory acne eating away the collagen in the skin as a result of the inflammation. And we see this a lot. And there's actually amazing treatments for it.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
The simplest form that you can do at home is to use a topical retinoid. So topical retinoids improve the appearance of acne scars. They remodel collagen and they increase collagen density in our skin. So at the minimum, I love patients to be on just a cream at night, which is a topical retinoid. Now, if that isn't enough and you want to address this, there are many ways we can treat this.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
I tend to treat ice pick scars with a technique called TCA Cross, which is an old school chemical peeling agent that we place in the scar itself. And it stimulates the scar to fill in on its own. Another option for ice pick scars that's great is microneedling. We love microneedling at a certain depth that stimulates collagen induction.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
Everything that we're doing, everything that we try to do is just to get your body to fill in that voided collagen to get the skin to come up. And then fraxel laser or non-ablative resurfacing kind of resurfaces everything in the second layer and helps improve that tone. So there's a lot of things you can do, but at the minimum, just start with a prescription retinoid.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
Yeah. A retinol, a sunscreen, that's like 90% of your regimen. Then simple things that you can also do. Obviously, improve your diet. If you're eating crappy, your skin's going to be crappy. If you're eating clean, you'll see the change in your skin. And then... Knowing your skin, if you're oily, you should wash the oil off. You will eventually break out. They will clog the pores in your skin.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
You'll get blackheads and whiteheads as a result. So if you're oily, wash that oil off. If you're dry, replace that moisture. And a common misconception I hear all the time is, oh, I'm drinking eight glasses of water. I'm like, drinking water has absolutely no bearing on skin hydration.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
The amount of water you consume will not affect whether your skin is dry or oily unless you're clinically dehydrated, which most people are not. So just do your normal diet things for fluid intake. But if your skin is oily, clean that oil off. If your skin is dry, moisturize.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
That in and of itself, some form of sun protection, some retinoid and simple things is more than 90% of having easy access, low hanging fruit to skin health. Myself, and this is no plug, but I do it every day, I take my sun powder. It provides the things that sometimes I forget. It provides all the antioxidants that I may not get on a busy operative day. It's a way that I can protect my skin.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
If you don't have to pick that, you can pick another form of an antioxidant, take your multivitamin, provide your vitamin C. If you like astaxanthin, supplement with that. These are things you can do at home. You don't need to see a doctor for. Collagen? Yeah, yeah, collagen, I love collagen. Collagen used to be like, collagen was an F in dermatology five years ago. Right. And it's an A now.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
Yeah, the amount of studies, and we're understanding, okay, there's a few things. Collagen itself is made of three amino acids that are non-essential, meaning your body can produce these amino acids with just any diet. Right. So for many years, scientists, physicians were saying, this is non-essential. Your body can make collagen even eating a pure carbohydrate diet.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
So supplementing is useless because our body can make a ton of it. We found a few things. As we've gotten more and more into 20 and 21st century, restrictive diets, fad diets are much more popular. People don't consume the same diets that we used to in the 50s and 40s, which was a little bit more umbrella-like. And we found that protein, collagen consumption, and just overall diet quality is poor.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
So when we've looked at recent studies over the last five years, including randomized studies that gave patients collagen supplementation versus not, there was a measurable improvement in the quality of their skin. And one thing we didn't account for is that when you consume collagen, water comes with it. You get intracellular and intravascular water uptake. So your skin actually plumps up more.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
You look a little bit more hydrated. We call it the oncotic pressure of our blood or the osmotic gradient goes up. So it draws water with it. So there is a measurable improvement. Collagen is easy to take. It's usually very well tolerated. It's very cost effective. So it's become a really popular thing that a lot of people recommend. 5 to 15 grams.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
The rest of it actually is pooped out and you can measure it in the stool, the amount of collagen you consume and you measure the stool output and most of it's in the poop. So you don't need as much as you think, but collagen is great. The other problem with collagen is it's a large molecule. It doesn't cross the gut very easily.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
So forms that are broken down, we call them, you know, collagen peptides or hydrolyzed collagen peptides are much more bioactive and absorbable. It's actually one of the reasons why that's the form we have in sun powder. But you want a form that's easily absorbed and you also want to have it with vitamin C because you can consume all the collagen in the world.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
But if you don't have a form of vitamin C, most people, you know, have a diet that will, you know, have the daily recommended amount, you can't remake that triple helix. The way collagen works when you consume it is your body breaks it down into the letters and then your body will reform the sentence that is the collagen triple helix. So you need that vitamin C. But I love it. Great product.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
I take it myself.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
So that's a, so I want to digress and make a couple of points on this. Family history, genetic history is one of the largest implicating factors in skin cancer. Now, this doesn't mean that Dr. Soleimani said sun plays no role. Go outside and burn all you want. Obviously, be sun smart. Don't burn. Just be cognizant of the fact that too much UV will increase your genetic predisposition.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
But that doesn't mean we should be sun avoidant. So you can enjoy the sun wisely. That's number one. Number two, and I emphasize this all the time because I see such bad cancers and things in patients that could have been caught earlier. You know your body better than any doctor does. You know your intuition, your second brain, which is the nervous system in our gut.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
It's the same reason why you get like a weird feeling when something bad is about to happen. Your gut intuition will tell you that something is not right better than any doctor. So if you feel like something is off, don't be blown off by your dermatologist, your primary care doc, your orthopedic surgeon, what have you.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
I see this all the time where patients come and say, hey, I'm not sure about this. And they say, oh, it's nothing. Fast forward five years, it's been neglected. Now there's a wonking something that shouldn't have been there. So if you don't feel comfortable about it and you didn't like the way your doctor approached that, seek a second opinion. You're not insulting anybody.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
You're advocating for your health. And in the United States particularly, we have to advocate for ourselves more than any other time in our lives. So that's one important thing. You know yourself better. The other things that I would say, you know, things that you want to watch out for, most common things is a pimple or what looks like a bug bite that doesn't heal in a month.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
That's a first sign that you should see a doctor. One month is our cutoff from things that are inflammatory, acne, zit, mosquito bite, etc. They should go away within a month. After a month, then we start to think, could this be a skin cancer? Could this be something that shouldn't be there?
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
So pimple or bug bite that doesn't go in a month, something that bleeds easily, that's the most common presenting sign for basal cell carcinomas. Patients wash their face and they see a spot of blood on their nose or a spot of blood on their cheek, and they haven't really done anything for it to bleed. And then the third is a new or a changing mole.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
So if you see any of those things, these are fundamental screening things that you can do at your house before you even seek a doctor. If you notice any of those things, go see your doctor, go see your primary care, go see your dermatologist.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
In terms of genetic screenings, when we talk about genetics, we look at traditionally we talk about what's called Mendelian genetics, meaning the genetics that are inherited predictably from mom and dad to children. blue eyes, you know, height, things like that. Things that are, okay, if you have, I don't know, red hair and dad has red hair, you have a 50% likelihood of getting.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
The problem with cancers is it doesn't follow Mendelian genetics. It doesn't follow hereditary patterns. I loved 23andMe and I say it in the past tense because a lot's changed. Way back when I was up north, I did 23andMe, and I got a bunch of data that was meaningless at the time, except the fact that I can explain to my wife why I drink six cups of coffee a day.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
But other than that, it didn't provide much, and I don't really drink that much, but you get my point. that testing for cancer genetics is convoluted. It's really complicated. It's all over the place. There's question about penetrance, cancer genetic expressions, incomplete penetrance, things like epigenetics that play a role.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
When we talk about cancer genes, we talk about things like the common people think about BRCA, breast cancer, B-R-C-A. That's a hereditary gene that, if you have, almost guarantees that you're going to get breast cancer or ovarian cancer. We talk about the retinoblastoma gene, the RB gene. If you have that, you're likely going to get a retinoblastoma.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
It's what you see in kids when they take a picture of their eye, and one eye looks a different color than the old Polaroids. You just say, oh. You know, most cancer genes aren't that hereditary like that. So to go and seek a test for skin cancers with the exception of a few rare conditions is unlikely to be helpful. Don't waste your money. You're better off just going to a standard. Yeah. Yeah.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
And you would know if you have the genetics already, you, Mom had it. Mom's mom had it. Mom's sister had it. You're like, okay, there's something there. I haven't tested the gene for it yet, but I know my family lineage has it. There's melanoma has two or three genes that are really important like that. And then basal cell has another genetic group that's like that.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
But aside from that, when we talk about family history, it's a whole myriad, 200 plus genes that are implicated in this that are passed down in not well understood ways. But Just simple pedigree, looking at your family. Hey, dad's on his sixth cancer on his ear. Dad's dad had it. You know, I burn easily. So you're like, oh shit, my family history is like, I'm likely going to get something.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
I appreciate that, man.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
I appreciate that. I have a small social media presence. It's TeosolemaniMD on Instagram. We have a practice website, which is CDMS or California Dermatology and Mohs Surgery Specialists. You can find us on our website, which is just CaliforniaDermatology.com. Pretty straightforward. But anyway, you guys can message me, email me. Everybody has my phone number. My patients have my phone number.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
You guys can call or text. I will try my best to respond to everybody. But I say this all the time. My goal, my role will always be to be a doctor first. My practice, my group, we see 250 patients a day. And we will always be centered on patient care, myself particularly in skin cancer, skin sun damage, surgery, and things like that. And I think there's a lot of information out there.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
There's a lot of data out there, but not a lot of information. And the problem with data is you can chop it up. in any which way you want to get the message that you're trying to push across. I mean, we didn't even talk about the most common things like, you know, Botox and things like that, that people spend a lot of money on. There's so much to talk about.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
But I think to look at an overarching picture, look at what happens to patients in real world settings, and then say, hey, Maybe we shouldn't be heavily leaning on this side. Maybe we shouldn't be heavily leaning on this side. But somewhere in the middle and picking a step this way or that way to optimize our health is the right way to do it.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
We've skewed so far on one side in healthcare in the United States in general that we've replaced common sense things with a pill, a prescription, a surgery, or a device. And I don't think we need to do that.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
So yes... with an asterisk, not skin specifically, because we know sun avoidance will decrease the likelihood of some garden variety skin cancers, but there was a great study that came out of Sweden back in 2000, maybe 16, 17, that looked at over 20,000 women that avoid the sun for risk of melanoma. And they matched those women who had strict sun avoidance to those who smoked a pack a day.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
And those patients had the same cardiovascular disease risk. And the presumption was that the patients who avoided the sun had some biologic changes related to chronic low vitamin D and other factors they couldn't measure in a test tube that equated to higher cardiovascular disease similar to pack-a-day smokers.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
So there's a lot that the sun provides that I can't quantify, but I can tell you, you'll feel better. You'll look better. So I think complete sun avoidance is a problem.
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
Now, if you know your family history, Drew, let's say you go outside and, okay, mom had skin cancer, dad had skin cancer, uncles had skin cancer, then maybe your tolerance, your body's ability to heal after getting a lot of UV is lower, genetically defined. So maybe you take a little bit more protection. But I think this blanket statement of you've
Dhru Purohit Show
Want to Maintain Youthful Skin At Any Age? Top Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Expert Shares his Favorite Skin Tips and Tools and Busts Major Myths Around Skin Damage with Dr. Teo Soleymani
If you're not burning, if you're getting it in the right way, S, zero question.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Patients who had surgery who smoke have a higher risk for poor wound outcomes, for poor healing because of that vasoconstriction. Usually people who use or consume nicotine aren't doing it once a week. Most people are using it daily or multiple times a day. So that chronic vasoconstriction adds up and has a net negative effect on the skin.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
So if you want to keep your skin healthy, if you want to look younger, I would refrain from nicotine use.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
So with vaping, we see the same problems in the skin. We don't know if it's an inhalational issue or if it's actually the same concentration of nicotine that's reaching local skin causing the effect. But we see the same vasoconstriction when you match cigarette smoke with vaping if you have the same nicotine content. Now for patches and gum, it's less of a problem.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
And why that is, is the concentration of nicotine that reaches the skin is much lower. Usually when you chew it, it has to go through your digestive tract, then enter your bloodstream, then reach the surface of the skin. When you have a transdermal patch, it still goes through the bloodstream. then ends up in the skin.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
So because of how much it has to be processed, the concentration that reaches the skin is much lower. When we operate, when we do surgery, any surgery of any kind, we try to transition people who smoke or vape to at least gums or patches to mitigate their withdrawal effect. So they don't have the feelings, but it doesn't have the same constrictive effects on their skin. What about alcohol?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Yeah, great question. Alcohol and skin connections, complicated, convoluted, but generally thought to be a net negative, both short-term and long-term. So first, alcohol tends to be a mild diuretic. So it makes our body dispose of water a little bit more frequently. What happens short-term is that
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
One, you get almost a mild diuretic effect from alcohol consumption, which is why you tend to be thirsty in the middle of the night and wake up in the morning, tend to be parched. As a result, you see that diuretic effect on our skin.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
You see a little bit of hollowing in areas that you'd have normal volume and suppleness, which is why people tend to see bags under their eyes or they look like they had a hangover. It's from that mild diuretic effect. Also, as a compensatory mechanism, the skin produces a bit more sebum to compensate for that drying out effect.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
So in the acute phase, your skin dries out, you look a little bit worse because of that diuretic effect. In patients who cannot or people who cannot tolerate alcohol, and there are genetics in Asian populations and Southeast Asians that have a difficulty in breaking down acetaldehyde, that is a toxin that shows up in the skin and makes the skin vasodilate as a result.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
So that common college term that we used to hear, the flush or the glow, or incorrectly called the Asian glow, is as a result of the inability to break down alcohol. And that usually you see immediately. People get a very bright red flush in their skin because of the acetaldehyde buildup in the skin. Long-term, one, the diuretic effect becomes a problem.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
So over time, your skin's producing constantly more sebum to keep the skin supple. Your skin is drying out. And as a result, you run into things like breakouts and congested skin, blackheads, whiteheads, things like that. But long-term alcohol use is also associated with lifestyle choices that may make your skin health worse.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Generally speaking, when people are out binge drinking, they tend not to come home and do things that'll maintain their skin. Now, that's not a fixed rule, but most of the time when you're out, you know, having a few beers or cocktails at the bar, you tend to come home and not do your diligent skincare routine, or you may not be up, you know, with your hydration status or your dietary habits.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
So that's something we can't quantify easily, but contributes significantly to faster aging, poor skin health. Then the gut microbiome question. This is a great question because the data is... widely variable for alcohol consumption and the effects or changes permanent or transient in the gut microbiome.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
There are some alcohol products like kombucha that has a higher alcohol concentration that's healthy for your gut. Then there's hard alcohols with a higher concentration that act as anesthetics and act as gut paralytics.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
One of the things we see in people who consume a lot of high percentage alcohols is actually gut immobility and gut paralysis, partly because of the anesthetic effect, partly because of the analgesic effect of alcohol, and also because it affects gut motility as a toxin. So generally speaking, the gut health, depending on your consumption patterns, use and concentration can be very deleterious.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Some people are very sensitive and they have changes that reflect in the skin as a result of drinking a lot. And then there are some people who tolerate it more or maybe consuming things that are healthier for the gut microbiome, like things like fermented alcohols, like kombucha and things like that. So generally speaking, the higher the concentration, the greater the the problems.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
The higher the percentage of alcohol, the greater the problems. That includes the diuretic effects, that includes effects on the gut microbiome, that includes lifestyle habits. If you're drinking a lot of higher percentage alcohols, you tend to feel the effects, you know, not just in the skin cognitively, behavior-wise, that can affect you.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Whereas sometimes lower concentration alcohols, depending on the setting and lifestyle, may be net neutral may be positive. I'm clear on that part.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Generally not. Same as what we've seen with other organ systems, the brain, the liver, the skin reflects the same thing. If anything, it may be a net neutral. Most of the time, it's a net negative.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Great question. That's another common misconception that I see in that thinking drinking a lot of water or drinking a lot of fluids will directly affect the hydration status of their skin. And while there's a certain degree of truth to that if you're dehydrated in that you need replenishment of fluid systemically,
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Every study that's looked at transepidermal water loss has not shown a great connection with regular fluid intake and water intake and skin hydration status. We find that that tends to be genetically defined and genetically encoded. Some people have drier skin. They need more methods to moisturize their skin. Some people have oilier skin, and their sebum provides that moisturization.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Now, if you're doing things, if you're active... If you're an athlete, if you're doing things in which you are dehydrated, then totally different story. But if you're living a more or less balanced life or a sedentary life and you're doing all the regular things, drinking a lot of water or fluids has not been shown to improve skin health.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
So that's why generally speaking, most dermatologists will recommend some sort of moisturizer to replenish that. But you got to know your skin. For example, my skin, I tend to be oilier. I don't usually need a moisturizer as much. Whereas somebody who is drier will need some sort of barrier protection to minimize that transepidermal water loss.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
It's a crazy market. There's a lot of things out there. I mean, you can Google skin snail moisturizer and you'll find people putting snail mucin on their skin as a moisturizer.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
human placenta as a means of rejuvenating their skin health. I don't advocate it or don't say anything against it, but I probably wouldn't recommend it. There's better, safer, more cost-effective ways of doing this. Simple things you want to look for. One, is it non-comedogenic? That's a word you want to look for for any moisturizer that's been tested not to clog your pores.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
That's a basic thing to look for where you won't cause another problem in trying to fix one problem. Number two, how oily or dry are you? Generally speaking, there are three flavors of moisturizers. There's ointments, there's creams, and there's lotions. Ointments are greasy. They're like petrolatum jelly or Vaseline based. Those are the best for moisturizing your skin, but they're greasy.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Then there's creams, which are water emulsions with oil suspended in it. And then there's lotions, which are generally powders that are resuspended with water. We as dermatologists tend to like the greasier the better. It provides the best barrier protection, but you have to know your skin.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
If you're somebody that is eczema prone, you will need something that is an ointment that does better to protect the skin from drying out. If you're somebody that is acne prone, you won't tolerate greasy things. You'll break out more. So you want to look for a lighter moisturizer that's non-covenogenic. So In a long story short, it's very person-to-person specific.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
You got to know your skin, but the fundamental things you want to look for is, has this been tested to not clog pores? And is it in a pump bottle or is it in a jar? Jars tend to be more occlusive. They tend to provide more moisturization, but they can lead to problems like acne and breakouts.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Whereas things in a pump bottle, because they're powders in suspension and they have to put alcohol in the product to allow it to come out of the pump mechanism, they tend to be lighter and not provide as much moisturization.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. The greasier, the more occlusion it provides. But in doing so, it clogs everything. Now, if you're one that has some sort of skin issue in which you need that, it's the best thing. If you're one that is breaking out all the time, you want something lighter.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Well, maybe you need a little bit more sleep or maybe you had a wild night. I can't tell. But generally, the bags are caused by two things. One, fluid retention. So there's some lymphatic change that occurs under the eyes that's most noticeable because the skin under our eyes and on the surface of our eyelids is the thinnest. So fluid changes are seen the quickest there.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
And as we're in a supine or prone position, fluid moves from our extremities back to our central venous system, and it's easier to collect in the face. So we see it around the face. The other thing that we do notice with bags is just age-related fat herniation that shows up more as we wake up because of positional changes.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
So if you've had a heavy meal the night before, something that has a high salt content, you're going to retain a little bit more water because of that solute shift. You may notice your eyes are puffier in the morning. If you have allergies, seasonal allergies, asthma, eczema, they run in a family, that tends to make your skin retain a little bit more water as a result of that allergy response.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
So people will notice springtime or fall time, their eyes are swollen or their eyes are puffy, especially when their allergies are flaring. It's a product of water retention from all the histamine release and changes that occur in the skin.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Skincare is an incredible multi-billion dollar market. That being said, there is not a shred of evidence that anything more expensive works better than anything cost effective. So that's first and foremost. Number two. Dove white bar soap is amazing. It's what we recommend for newborns and kids with sensitive skin.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Generally, when we say sensitive skin, especially in kids, toddlers, and adolescents, there's a component of some sort of eczema or atopic dermatitis that is not bad enough to have a diagnosis, but enough to say, you know, I had sensitive skin. So Dove white bar soap is what I use for my kids. And I'm not sponsored by anybody either. But I think it's an amazing product because it's safe.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
It's effective. It has the least amount of ingredients. No fragrances. These are all things that can irritate or cause an allergic response to skin that is sensitive. Meaning... your skin mounts an immune response to some sort of environmental allergen or trigger. That's what we generally mean when we talk about sensitive skin. I personally use Cetaphil. That's my face wash.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
I have oily skin and I use the one that takes off more of the oil. So what you're looking for is defined by what bothers you or what your skin predicament is. What I do see as a problem nowadays is, particularly in the United States, we're a hyper-hygienic society. So what people tend to do is over-cleanse. And they over-cleanse for several reasons.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
One, because they are told that cleansing will fix their skin issue. Or number two, they're told that some sort of organism is on their skin or some sort of bacteria that needs to be cleansed off to keep their skin healthy. Neither are true. The first thing you want in terms of a cleanser is something that's mild, fragrance-free, and has been tested to be hypoallergenic or non-comedogenic.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
And that's first. Cetaphil, Dove, CeraVe, great, great stuff. No association with any of them.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Exactly. That's first. Fragrances tend to be a problem for sensitive skin in patients who have atopic dermatitis or eczema. they tend to trigger allergic responses or exacerbations of their eczema flare. So we try to avoid fragrances by all means. Then things that are gels or liquids tend to have preservatives in them to increase shelf stability, whereas bars tend not to.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
So if you are going to pick something that is a gel, a liquid, look for one that's been tested by a dermatology group or verified by the American Academy of Dermatology as one that is not allergenic or has multiple preservatives because that's another well-known preservative. but unidentified source of problems.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Well known to the dermatology world, not known to the average person that the preservatives in our cleansers are a problem. Overcleansing becomes really problematic in eradicating the skin microbiome. So what we see a lot of times are cleansers that are either
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
bactericidal, bacteriostatics, things like benzoyl peroxide, things like salicylic acid, things like certain astringent toners that are alcohol-based. And what they do is not only do they strip the normal oils from our skin that keep our skin supple and healthy, but they eradicate the normal host skin microbiome. Those are all the microorganisms that live on our skin.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
And we have trillions of them actively surveying our skin, living in normal symbiotic homeostasis, meaning there are friends, they're living there for a reason, they don't cause any problems. But when you cleanse them off, you open up a an area for pathogens to take effect. And that's when we see a lot of problems, more so in industrialized countries.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
The United States is a notorious place for washing, especially after COVID. Wash, wash, wash, wash more, use a toner, wash some more. And that becomes really problematic because it sets up for organisms to take seed when they shouldn't be there. So Overall, cleansing is great, and the amount that you need to cleanse is based on how oily or sebaceous your skin is.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
The older you get, you may not need to cleanse as much. Older patients don't need to cleanse their skin at all every day because they don't produce as much sebum or oil as younger patients. But everything should be defined by your skin's characteristics. So if you are one in which you notice by the end of the day, I'm oily. I'm breaking out.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Cleansing may be something that's beneficial for you to take off that excess sebum. If you're one that has dry skin, if you're one that had sensitive skin as a child, then over-cleansing is going to be a problem. You're going to want to minimize that and keep that moisturization or that barrier protection going.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
um there's a lot of factors to this i i i think ashton kutcher and mila kunis famously said they shower i think once a week or something like that and it stirred up a lot of conversation when that came out truth be told you don't have to cleanse every day if your skin is otherwise fine and healthy and you're not bothered by anything you live a lifestyle in which you're not sweating excessively or producing a lot of sebum
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Myself same thing. I work out so I Shower after working out and I usually shower before I get into bed because after a long day of work I tend to have you know things on my skin that shouldn't be there That's only fitting for me because if I don't I tend to have problems I tend to break out I tend to have things that you know shouldn't happen because of my hygiene habits That said I
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
there is no indication or no medical necessity to have to cleanse your skin even once a day. Oftentimes, older patients cleanse or shower once a week and they're totally fine, but it'll have to be defined by your skin and what problems or ailments are specific to you. Generally, If you work out, if you let sweat dry on your skin, it causes several problems.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Number one is irritation itself from the salts that crystallize from the sweat drying off. Number two, the sweat itself is a source of food for certain yeast that are normal symbiotic yeast that live on our skin. So it contributes to things like dandruff, what we call tinea versicolor, which is a type of yeast that grows on our skin. So generally, if you work out, try to wash those things off.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Also, if you are one of acne prone skin, if you're an adolescent, if you're a teenager, if you're an adult dealing with acne, The sebum that your body's producing is food for the bacteria that caused this. So you tend to want to clean some of that excess sebum off. Those are simple indications to cleanse both your face and your body.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
But if you're not having any problems, you actually don't need to do any of that. In Europe, they shower and cleanse at a fraction of the frequency that we do in the United States. And when you look at incidences of the most common skin conditions, they're the same.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
So when we think about the scalp, when we think about dry or flaky scalp, we think about two main conditions, either seborrheic dermatitis, which is medical grade dandruff, or the medical name for dandruff, or psoriasis. They're two different entities, but they generally contribute to the same problem, which is redness, flaking, and dryness of the scalp.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Now it's important to note that the hair on your head is dead. It's not alive. The only area that's alive is two and a half millimeters in the skin. So the hair that we see on our scalp is not a living entity. So there's a common misconception that you can affect the, health or quality of your hair by putting things on the hair. And I'll go into that in just a minute.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
But the hair itself that you see is not living. The only area that's living are the stem cells in the papilla of the hair and in the bulge region of the hair, which reside in the skin. So nothing that you put on your scalp will make you lose your hair, will make you grow new hair for the most part. Why that's important? When we treat dry or flaky scalp, we treat it with several things.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
The most common cause is an overgrowth of yeast from the sweat and oil that is produced from our scalp. And that's seborrheic dermatitis. That's the medical name for dandruff. And so we treat it by one, lowering the amount of that yeast that's living. And that's usually with shampoos. that are prescription or over-the-counter. Things like zinc or ketoconazole shampoos are very common things.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
And then the other thing that we do is to dampen the immune response to this overgrowth of yeast. So the reason our skin flakes and gets red and proliferates is our immune system's responding to something. It's either responding to the yeast or it's responding to itself, which is what psoriasis is.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
It's an immune-mediated overproliferation of skin cells because the immune system is overactive in the skin. And the way we treat that is just topicals or certain medications that suppress the skin's immune system or immune activity. None of that affect the actual hair itself. What does happen is shampoos tend to have things that strip oils as a mechanism of cleaning.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
So when you take a cross section of the hair, there's seven layers. And the layer that provides that color, sheen, and structure is called the cuticle. As we age, we lose the cuticle. And that's a common problem, what we see in male and female pattern hair loss or androgenetic alopecia is we lose that cuticle, which makes us lose the shine and the structure and the strength of our hair.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
our body tries to replenish that with the oils. So when people wash their hair, sometimes they feel like their hair becomes more limp or dull or lifeless. It's because we've taken that artificial oil coating that replaced the cuticle and washed it off. So good news is you're not gonna do any harm putting any of the topicals on your scalp.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Bad news is you probably won't bring a lot of it back to life either. But when we treat flakiness, redness, things like that, we're treating two entities, usually with topicals. And because we're either trying to treat overproliferation of something or trying to calm down the skin's immune system.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
No, I think, one, you're absolutely right. The more expensive does not mean better. In fact, they sometimes become more problematic because there's more ingredients in the more expensive products, including elegant fragrances and stuff like that, which can be problematic. That's number one. The second thing to know is that, generally speaking, there is some connection between
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
skin health, skincare, and this realm of beauty, which people overlap a lot in. And when we trend into this realm of beauty, glamor, et cetera, price and objectivity are taken out. And that's why you see a lot of skincare products that are so expensive because they draw towards another level of desire that's not just medical, it's aesthetic.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
And that's where you'll find creams that are two, $300 for a little amount of cream that does the same thing that your jar of petrolatum or Vaseline or Aquaphor does. That part is really hard to mitigate.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
But in general, almost everything that we as dermatologists and skin cancer surgeons and experts in the field recommend are really cheap, cost-effective, and they have the least amount of ingredients in them. And that's what I would recommend. That's what I recommend for my family and for my patients.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
You don't have to spend a lot to have excellent skin care, and you don't need to have it be a multi-step routine. Oftentimes, people overdo it, you know, The more steps there are, there's more chances that something your skin will respond to negatively. The more chances you are to have a bad outcome to an ingredient of a product you're putting on your skin.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
So keep it simple, keep it cheap, and you'll do great.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Not much at all, not anything. And another important thing to consider when looking at skincare, skin health, and then trending into that area of aesthetics and beauty is that most active ingredients if they're really active, tend to be controlled by the FDA.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
So most things that are sold over the counter have actives that are not at a concentration high enough to be considered therapeutic, because that's when you get into the definition of a drug. So looking at things like anti-dandruff shampoos, you know, anti-aging creams, you know, acne medications. They work a little bit.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
If they work perfectly, then most medical dermatologists would be out of a lot of patients. And we see a lot of skin disease that still continues because the active ingredients aren't at a concentration high enough to provide therapeutic benefit. So save your money.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
If you really need something to change some part of your skin, see a good dermatologist, see an expert and see what they can come up with.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Great, like great controversial question. And it depends on which... school of thought or camp you belong in. As a skin cancer surgeon and somebody who's developed a reputation for seeing some of the worst, most complicated and life-threatening skin cancers in Los Angeles, obviously I see some of the consequences of long-term sun exposure and chronic photoaging.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
That being said, I absolutely think that getting sun is healthy for us. Now, Why? The studies that talk about vitamin D, and we'll touch on vitamin D as its own entity and then overall health as another entity, but most of the studies that look at vitamin D synthesis from UV exposure on the skin suggest that you only need about 15 minutes and that you don't need a broad surface area of exposure.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
You can get enough vitamin D formation with just about 15 to 20 minutes of sun on your forearms. So there's a whole school of thought by a lot of experts who think there's no amount of UV exposure that's healthy for the skin. And I tend to be on the other camp for several reasons. One, there is a component of...
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
feel goodness, if that's a word, from being in the sun that affects overall skin and physical biology. When you're out in a sunny day, you tend to be less stressed. You tend to be a little happier. Now, it's a generalization, but most of the time, When you get outdoors, you get outside and it's a nice sunny day, you feel better.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
And although you can't quantify that feeling better, there are some parameters that can be measured. Decreases in cortisol response, improvements in skin appearance and texture. The other important thing about being out in the sun is finding out your own tolerance, right?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
So I have a little bit more olive skin and I can tolerate the sun a little bit longer than somebody who has fairer and lighter eyes. In my opinion, I don't think, in most of the evidence, there isn't a finite amount of time because that time is dictated by your skin's ability to tolerate the UV. But I absolutely do not think that sun avoidance is a healthy thing.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
And this is coming from somebody who operates on head and neck skin cancers literally every day. I think there is a component of sun exposure that's not just for vitamin D synthesis, but something that improves your overall wellness that is... visible and maybe not laboratory measurable, but you definitely are healthier when you're feeling better and you're happier.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
I lived on the East Coast in places that had lower days of sun and I had seasonal affective disorder. It bothered me. My mood was lower. I felt not as healthy. You know, I'd come home, my family would say, hey, you look sick. And it just, I wasn't sick. I hadn't had any son. I was lighter than I was. And my family interpreted that as not being healthy. You know, my wife, on the other hand, didn't.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
She didn't mind the grayness. So there's a timeline for biologic processes like vitamin D formation that's helpful. People can argue that you can get it through supplementation and food, and that's correct.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
But there is a component of sun exposure that makes you feel better overall and provides some sort of wellness that you may not be able to quantify, but you see in appearance and in discussion and longevity. So absolutely, I think you should be out in the sun. I don't think you should burn. And I don't think you should be out long enough where your skin starts to turn red.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
That's the first sign that you're reaching kind of critical mass in terms of UV exposure. But I absolutely think the sun is a good thing for us.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Yeah. I think, I mean, midday sun has a higher UV index, so you're more likely to burn and have a problem with prolonged exposure. But yeah, absolutely. I think You know, there's been numerous studies that have looked at people who go out for a walk in, you know, busy urban cities in work environments. If they go out for a walk in the sun, they feel better. Their stress responses are lower.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Their questionnaires in responding to life stressors and day-to-day stressors are decreased. There's a lot of studies that look at being outside as a measure of well-being, mental health well-being, um, is improved with outdoor sun exposure. So there's a lot of that. Now, can I quantify it in the skin? Hard to say.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
One thing we do know is that obviously too much sun exposure, like anything, too much of a good thing can be a bad thing. But I really do think that being out in the sun for the amount that your skin can tolerate is a good thing.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Thanks for having me. It's awesome to be here. I'm Very, very privileged to be here. Thank you.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Yeah. So a lot of the nomenclature data, understanding chemicals, things that were considered okay to be used came from an original FDA 1999 manuscript. And that data hadn't changed for almost 20-something years. And more recently in 2021, the FDA released a proposed final order for the term sunscreens as a whole.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Now, when we talk about sunscreens, sunscreens are considered an over-the-counter non-prescription drug. So they're regulated tightly by the FDA. They're in the same category as any over-the-counter drug. So before this decision ruling, there was a lot of nomenclature, wording, confusion. Sunblock seemed better than sunscreen, suntan, suntan oil. All of that's been...
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
changed recently or has been proposed to get rid of to unify the field and make it very clear what the goal is. So no longer do we use the term sunblock, although in the past that had been used for things like zinc or zinc and titanium based creams, like the old 1980s or 1990s white lifeguard noses, if you remember, that used to be thought of sunblock. Whereas
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
less protective chemicals were used as sunscreen. Now that's changing. And the FDA 2021 proposed order says we need to unify everything and call it a sunscreen. Now, sunscreens being regulated drugs take a lot of scrutiny for many reasons. They take scrutiny from the FDA in terms of proving efficacy and safety. They take a lot of scrutiny in society for being
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
dangerous or not dangerous, effective or not effective, causing downstream effects or not causing downstream effects. So that's been a big point of contention in terms of population, the American Academy's stance, dermatologists' stance, and then the skin cancer patients' beliefs, the beauty experts' beliefs, and average person's opinions.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Sunscreens generally fall into creams, lotions, topical products that protect the skin against sunburn. We used to be able to suggest that they reduced the risk of skin cancer, prevented premature aging, but that can be a little convoluted and the FDA is rewording that into not being able to say that anymore in their proposed order.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
But what sunscreen's intention is, is to protect the skin against excess UV exposure. And they come in two flavors. They come in mineral-based sunscreens, which tend to be in the category of zinc and titanium minerals. And they tend to be chemical sunscreens, which are a bunch of different chemicals.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Yeah, inorganic or physical sunscreens, whereas the chemicals are considered organic or chemical sunscreens. Totally right.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Yeah. Historically, it had been thought that mineral or physical sunscreen, zinc, zinc and titanium sunscreens, worked by basically acting as a metal reflecting shield. For the most part, that thinking is not incorrect. There was a new study that showed that they work by actually absorbing them, but not having any sort of chemical change.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
So the way chemical organic sunscreens work is they absorb the ultraviolet radiation, they undergo a chemical reaction to reduce its energy and dissipate that energy as heat. So chemical sunscreens work by actually absorbing it and undergoing a change, whereas mineral or physical sunscreens don't do that.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
I still think of them simply as minerals basically shield the skin like armor, whereas chemicals act as a sink and undergo a change to reduce that energy. So that's kind of the simplistic way that sunscreen, topical sunscreens work.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Yeah. In fact- Physical barriers like shade, clothing, hats have been shown to be more effective than topical sunscreens for several reasons. But there are many ways to protect your skin, and you have to ask why you're protecting your skin. So is it because you're worried about premature aging? aging, photo damage, and things like of that nature? Are you worried about your risk for skin cancer?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Do you have a sun-sensitive skin condition like lupus or PMLE that is sensitive to UV exposure? So the first question is, why are you worried or why are you taking protection? And then you customize your approach to that. Now, sunscreen, topical sunscreens are not the only form.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
By and large, there are many other forms, both physical blockers and certain things in the supplement world that can protect your skin. For example, I myself take a product called sun powder that provides an internal sun shield and allows me to be in the sun longer. without the need to reapply or if I can't reapply.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
But by and large, the best way to protect your skin is some sort of shield, whether it's clothing, hat, or some sort of cream that you put on. Now, for patients who are worried or for people who are worried about premature aging, they don't have a strong family history of skin cancer. They've never had one before themselves.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Then the approach to that is a little bit different than people who are worried about skin cancer development, strong family history of skin cancer. They're worried about losing a part of their ear or part of their nose to skin cancer development. And that's very different from medical conditions that are very sun sensitive. By and large, the
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Patients who have medical conditions that are sun sensitive, the large one being lupus, for example, need the most sun protection because they are so inherently sensitive to UV exposure. Something that's very interesting.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
We know without a doubt that every common skin cancer, there's many, many skin cancer types, but the three most common are basal cell carcinoma, squamous cell carcinoma, and melanoma. Those are the three most common ones we see. they have all been shown to have UV mutation signatures when we sequence the tumors.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Well, you look great for 49. So whatever you're doing, keep it up. So the skin's an amazing organ, just like you said. It's the largest organ, the largest dynamic organ we have in our body. You have new skin, brand new skin every 28 days. So the surface of your skin turns over about every month.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
However, in every single clinical trial, in every single randomized trial that looked at topical sunscreens as a means of reducing risk, there has not been a single study that showed any sort of risk reduction in the development of the most common skin cancer, which is basal cell carcinoma. One in four Americans will develop this.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Also, there hasn't been a single study to date that showed that diligent sunscreen use, topical sunscreens, will reduce disease-specific death or dying from skin cancer. So if you think Every skin cancer is sun-driven. There are UV mutation profiles in these tumors. Then by using sunscreen should reduce that, right? And it's not that clear. We don't understand fully the drivers of this.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
So why I bring this up and why we talk about sunscreens and barriers to blockade first, topical sunscreens are not the only form. In fact, clothing and shields, shade and hat are, in my opinion, better. And a lot of studies suggest that they're better. There are oral supplements that can also protect your skin from burning and reduce your skin cancer risk.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
And number three, not everything is sun-driven. We do know that diligent sunscreen use decreases the incidence or the amount of melanoma formation and squamous cell formation, but we still don't know whether that reduction has changed the number of patients dying from that. We also know that it has no bearing in the development of the most common skin cancer, which is basal cells.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
So we go back to the drawing board and scratch our heads saying, hey, what is the trigger? You know, the genetics loads the gun, for example, and maybe even pulls the hammer. But what in the environment is the trigger? Is it strictly UV? Is it some other culprit? So sunscreens are a really hotly debated topic. So many things to talk about in terms of sunscreen.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Now the stem cells, which are in the lowest portion of our epidermis, remain and they generate the skin cells, but you have brand new skin the same way you have new gut lining every 28 days. It's amazing for many reasons because the skin is one of the few organs that can regenerate because of this. So you can grow new skin. You can test things on skin.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Great question. And the more we dive into this and the more experts we look at and the more data we collect, the more we're scratching our head as to we don't know and why this occurs. Now, I'm not saying don't use sunscreen. Let's just let that be known. I think sunscreens are excellent forms to protect against premature photoaging and signs of sun damage.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
I think sunscreens help reduce the incidence of common garden variety skin cancers, but they are not the only form of protection, and they seem to not be as important or have as much effect in reducing the incidence of our most common skin cancer, which is basal cell carcinoma. Moreover, I would say, and the data unfortunately shows,
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
that the majority of skin cancers that we see that end up hurting people or killing patients don't arise in chronic sun-exposed areas to begin with. I have a 27-year-old patient right now dying of a metastatic melanoma that arose in completely sun protected skin. I have a 56-year-old mechanic right now who's dying of a squamous cell carcinoma that arose from the back of his ear.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
And most experts who have this type of experience dealing with these patients have the same observation. So the question is, what's pulling the trigger? For the most part, UV plays a big role. the mechanism in which cancer forms, if we believe the basic high school biology is, hyperplasia, metaplasia, dysplasia, carcinoma.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
So there's a trajectory of changes that are occurring as a result of cumulative mutations in the skin. If we believe that trajectory, then every skin cancer should see that change, and we just don't see that. Also, we know that skin cancers that arise in sun-damaged skin behave differently than the ones that are very lethal.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
So why I bring this up, I think sunscreen is very helpful, but we have this unfortunate trend in medicine, particularly in dermatology, to guilt people into thinking that they cause this to themselves. And I don't think that's right nor okay. And I don't like that because they make it seem that, oh, the sun you got in 1987, that one sunburn in Hawaii did it to you.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
And that's absolutely not the case. There are many things at play, fundamentally your genetics and immune system, that play a huge role in skin cancer development that sunscreen cannot address and will not address. Now, the wild card is, okay, what are my genetics?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
And that's the part we don't know, which is why dermatologists say, okay, let's at least control the thing that we can, which is UV exposure. But I bring this up because, you know, Don't feel bad about getting some sun and don't feel guilted into something that if something bad occurs, it's not your fault. Some of it is out of your control.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
And that's really important because I see a lot of very bad skin cancers in my practice. And I hate this feeling of patients feeling like they did it to themselves.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
If your skin gets injured, it will regenerate and heal itself, whereas many other organs cannot do that. And because of this, it also allows us to use it as a model platform for studying diseases of all kinds. So skin's an amazing organ.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
A lot of good points. So there's that famous New England Journal of Medicine picture of the truck driver that got chronic sun exposure on the left side of his face. And you see all this wrinkling and modeling of the skin on the left side and nothing on the right side. So by absolute measure, sun protection or UV protection will reduce premature aging.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Now, interestingly, that guy did not develop anything in that area. So again, it goes back to, well, no skin cancers.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
So the question is, what's pulling the trigger? Is it truly UV or is there something else we're missing?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
I don't know if he's had any on the opposite side, but in that photo, it's purely premature aging. So things that you want to do, obviously, don't let your skin turn red. Take some form of barrier protection, whether it's a sunscreen, a supplement like polypodium, something that protects your skin from the inside out. And skin changes are cumulative.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
So what we can tolerate in our teens and 20s is very different than what we can tolerate in our 40s, 50s, and 60s because there's a cumulative mutation profile burden that we see. Interestingly, there was an eyelid study that was published recently that looked at eyelid skin that was removed during cosmetic surgery, upper eyelid lifts that were otherwise discarded. And when
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
They ran genetic sequencing on normal eyelid skin. They saw the same mutations that they would see in matched skin cancers. But the eyelids didn't have any skin cancer. So we know UV triggers these mutations. And we know UV degrades collagen and elastin. It thins blood vessel walls as a mechanism of its effects on the dermis.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
The data is equivocal as to how those mutations trigger skin cancer formation. But in terms of premature aging, absolutely. So you want to take some form of protection. Now, what type of protection do you take? Depends on your genetics, how much you can tolerate and what your family lineage looks like. Some people have the genetics of early aging. It's part of their skin biology.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
And you can't change that, but you can mitigate that risk with more strict UV avoidance. Mm-hmm. Some people, you know, they look young longer. You know, some family lineages just have great genetics in their skin. They can tolerate a little bit more sun. In terms of physical sunscreens versus chemical sunscreens, that's a hotly debated topic.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
In my personal practice and for my family, I tend to only recommend mineral zinc or zinc and titanium sunscreens for several reasons. In the original set of sunscreens that were approved by the FDA that came out in 1999, there wasn't enough data to look at biologic effects, efficacy, internal organ involvement, et cetera.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Fast forward 20 years, and we've gathered a lot more information about these chemical organic compounds. There is an amazing 2020 study that looked at absorption of chemical sunscreens when they're applied onto the skin. They looked at absorption with single application, and they looked at absorption over four days of application. Now, in this study, they applied a little bit more than...
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
real world experience would, but even with single application, they saw blood plasma absorption of these chemicals that were 100 to 500 times greater than the upper threshold defined by the FDA. Now the question exists, okay, what does that mean? Is this healthy? Is this not healthy? Is it neither?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
That's still up for debate, but in looking at the more recent literature and looking at the chemical structure of these compounds, a lot of these are phenolic compounds, meaning they have one or two, usually two benzene rings attached together, and they look very similar to one another.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
There's been a lot of basic science, animal study, and retrospective human studies in the last two or three years that suggest that some of these chemical compounds, particularly oxybenzone, particularly octocrylene, particularly octinoxinate, that can have endocrine disruption or affect the nervous system because they mimic a lot of biologic phenolic compounds and a lot of biologic hormones.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
If you actually look at the structure of oxybenzone, it looks very similar to the structure of bisphenol A, which has been now banned in a lot of the lining of plastic bottles. Why? Because of the same concept. Now, the data is not... 100% one way or another, but there's enough smoldering evidence that makes me think, hmm, we should reinvestigate this.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
And in fact, the FDA's proposed final order in 2021 changed these chemicals from grace, generally recognized as safe and effective, to not grace because of these concerns. There's data that suggests that the chemicals are found in breast milk, amniotic fluid, blood plasma, urine. So there's a lot of things that we don't know.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
And I always say this in science, we take two steps forward and then maybe one step diagonally or sideways because we ran into unexpected things. I tend to recommend mineral sunscreens because they don't have any of that data. They haven't for the last 30, 40 years. They're considered safe. And in fact,
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
For young kids, particularly those six months and under, the American Academy of Dermatology and the American Academy of Pediatrics generally recommends avoiding chemical sunscreens. Why? Children's skin, particularly infants and toddlers, behaves more like mucous membranes than adult skin. Their barrier is not as tightly woven, so they absorb these things at a much higher concentration.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
So if you are to apply something on kids, especially young kids six months or under, we recommend minerals to begin with. So I say, if you have a pool of compounds that has maybe even smoldering evidence on the basic science level that something's off versus a group of compounds that have really no data, which one would you pick? And they do the same thing. I naturally gravitate towards that.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
And that's mineral, not like powder, not mineral powder, but mineral topicals because mineral powders are a whole other issue we'll talk about.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Yeah. So exactly right, mineral-based creams and lotions, I tend to prefer and recommend in my practice, and most people will if you're worried about any risk, any consequence. Chemicals, I tend to personally avoid. Now, this may not be in line with all my dermatology colleagues, but I tend to avoid them, and I do not recommend them for kids.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
In terms of things that you can do in addition to provide sun protection, polypodium is a fern from the Amazon rainforest that was discovered when they studied an indigenous population that would eat this fern before they would go on their fishing expeditions on the Amazon. And they'd be gone for three days. They'd eat this fern and come back not burned.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
So a lot of studies were done on this fern in the last five, 10 years that showed it increases your skin's minimal erythema dose, the amount of redness your skin gets from UV exposure. That's our general barometer for effectiveness without any topicals. It's taken or ingested orally. I personally use a form called sun powder that also has nicotinamide in it.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
And we can talk about nicotinamide later. But if... In and of itself, it works great. In conjunction with topicals, you get the best of both worlds. You get internal shielding and external shielding. Now, it is a supplement, so it's not a controlled drug the way the FDA regulates sunscreen. So it isn't really a sunscreen, but it's a way to prevent...
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
sunburns, increase the amount of time you can be outside and increase the efficacy of your topical. So if you're somebody who is very fair skin, who burns all the time, or if you're somebody who has like what we call sun hives or prickly sun rash, PMLE, this is an added thing that you can use that will boost your sun protective factors. It's awesome.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
And if you're somebody who's active, like you're in the water or you're you know, exercising or you're playing a sport and you can't reapply, I love polypodium for that added benefit.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Yeah, that's a great question. So in order to understand that, we have to just look at the structure of the skin. So the skin generally is three layers, the epidermis, the dermis, and the subcutaneous fat. And the dermis is where most of the biologic activity resides. That's where our blood vessels are. That's where the nerves that innervate sensation and movement reside.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Yeah, great question. So there's been a wide variety of doses investigated, anywhere from 50, 100, 240, 480. Generally, some... You said 1,500? No, sorry, 50 milligrams, 100 milligrams, 240, 480. Okay. Somewhere in between 50 and 480 milligrams is what's commonly used. The most common side effect can be a little upset stomach if you can't tolerate the plant for whatever reason. It's taken daily?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
You can either take it daily as a method of preventing premature photoaging and pigmentary change, or you can take it as needed an hour before you get sun to shield you from the sun. The other thing that it helps prevent that some sunscreens cannot, particularly the chemical sunscreens cannot, is the effects of visible light.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
So there are certain skin conditions, the most common is melasma, which a lot of women have, you know, it's I think the bane of their existence. It used to be called the mask of pregnancy. And melasma is something that is very sensitive to both UV light, and visible light. Chemical sunscreens don't do a good job blocking visible light.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Polypodium has been shown to help block the effects of visible light as well, which makes melasma worse. It's this discoloration that we see mostly in women, usually after pregnancy or women who are on birth control. It is really challenging to treat. And sun protection is the first line, like diligent sun protection.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
But we found that supplementing with polypodium enhances this and makes patients' treatments more effective.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
So yes, Sunpowder is a brand. It's a product that I helped formulate with one of my colleagues over at Harvard who's a laser and aesthetic dermatologist at Harvard trained. And this is something that we came up with when I was up at Stanford. And it's a supplement dedicated to skin health. And it does two things. I take it daily myself as a single scoop.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
It helps reduce your skin cancer risk, your non-melanoma skin cancer risk by up to 30%. And the data was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in a phase three randomized trial for one of the ingredients. The other ingredient, obviously, is polypodium. And I take that one to prevent sun-related changes, but also help reduce my risk of burning. Often when I'm personally...
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
find the need for sunscreen, it's when I can't apply. Always at the water, I'm swimming. My son, he's seven, he races on a swim team. I cannot get this kid to reapply sunscreen. So this is a supplement that I give him. And it took us several years of formulation and testing, including MED testing, which is minimal erythema dose testing to come up with.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
It's easy over the counter and it's one of many supplements that contain polypodium. I just like it because it's a single scoop and I mix it into my morning drink and I'm done. Terrific.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
That's where our hair follicles, oil glands, and sweat glands reside. So stress has two components. There's what we call acute stress, meaning stress that happens within a short period of time. And then there's long-term stress or chronic stress. And both have different processes in the skin. And you see the results of stress
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Yeah. So I tend to take a pragmatic approach in this. My recommendation is a brand that you will use. Because if I recommend a brand and you don't like it, it doesn't feel good or smell good, you're never going to use it and it's a waste of your money and time. So number one, any brand that is mineral-based is fine.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
What you're looking for is broad spectrum coverage, which almost all mineral-based sunscreens provide. Broad spectrum meaning UVA and UVB. And we know these two UV forms do different things in the skin. We know that UVB is more implicated in redness and some early skin cancer changes. We know UVA is linked to premature photoaging and certain melanomas.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
So you want something that provides broad spectrum coverage. You're looking for a number, the SPF we talk about. You're looking for a number above 30. Why 30? Because every study that looked at defining the SPF required you to put a certain amount on the skin. Generally, it's an entire shot glass worth of the product on sun exposed skin.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Most of the time in real world practice, people don't put on that much. They put on maybe half that. So what you're really getting when you buy something that's SPF 15 is like an SPF of 8. So if you're looking for something that provides protection, SPF 30 or greater is higher. Higher the zinc concentration, the better it protects against UV invisible light. The chalkier it may go on.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
So that's kind of where you find that balance. That's actually where the chemical sunscreens came about, is the cosmeceutical industry finding things that felt nicer on the skin so that people could put makeup on without that grainy chalkiness. But in doing so, we ran into some issues.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
It's not unjustified to think that. They are organic phenolic compounds. They are hydro... They're lipophilic, meaning they can cross membranes very easily, which is why they run into this endocrine disruption and some nervous system dysregulation. Whether that's been validated to be problematic in humans has yet to be seen, but at least in vitro studies in certain animal models, we see this.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
So when you apply a certain concentration and with that 2020 study that showed that we're seeing it in the blood at levels that are 200 to 500 times the upper limit of normal as defined by sunscreen criteria, Now we have to scratch our head. Where is this circulating? Where is this going? Are we collecting it in our adipose tissue? If we're collecting it there, we may be collecting it up here.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
We may be collecting it in the nerves. So it's a really fascinating world to see where we're going with these. And in fact, the 16 most common chemicals that in 99 were everywhere from spray sunscreens and bottles and things like that are now being defied as, hmm, question mark, maybe not safe by the FDA, the very company that regulates it.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
both immediately in the skin with release of certain chemical messengers in an autocrine, paracrine, and holocrine fashion. And then you see the long-term deleterious effects of stress in a different mechanism in which there's actually breakdown of the skin. The easiest way to see this is when people are stressed and they lose their hair. And the hair obviously is an extension of our skin.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Or even shade hat clothing. If you're really worried about putting something on in absorption, you get excellent protection by actual barriers.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
So there is an incredible connection between the gut microbiome and skin health and the skin microbiome, of which we're only now just understanding the gravity, the extent, and the connection. We know from many studies, many elegant studies, a lot of studies done out of my colleagues' labs up at Stanford, that modulating the gut microbiome affects inflammatory conditions of the skin.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Meaning, if you control the dysregulation of the gut microbiome, if you have an anti-inflammatory dietary habit, actual skin disease decreases in intensity and severity, psoriasis, eczema, acne. And this is not just subjectively, it's measurable and quantifiable and reproducible. So the connection is fascinating. Now, how we modulate it, that's the unknown.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
We know in many different studies that some patients' gut microbiomes are wildly fluctuant to what they do from their environment in terms of dietary habits, antibiotics, things like that. Some people's gut microbiomes are rock solid. Nothing changes them. And deciphering whose will benefit from what is the hardest part.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
In terms of nutrition overall, obviously everybody's told you this since the dawn of modern medicine is a well-balanced diet is good for everything. Unfortunately, in the 21st century, there are a lot of diets. There are a lot of fad diets. There are a lot of restrictive diets. And that's where we see nutrition play an important role in both appearance and actual skin disease health.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
And there's so many different avenues to discuss this. Things like dietary habits and changes for acne. Things like dietary habits and changes for anti-aging. Things like dietary habits for rash disorders like psoriasis and eczema. It's so much to explore.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
It's a biosensor of our well-being. And we see this all the time. I see students during finals time where they're really stressed out and they're coming with their hair falling out. Or after a large medical illness or a pregnancy, patients will come in and say their hair is falling out. So that acute stress is seen right away.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
So there's a lot of layers to unravel on this. So if you're going to pick one simple diet for optimal skin health, it's a high protein anti-inflammatory diet. So high protein animal source proteins, fruits and vegetables, based on your ability to tolerate the fibers in the fruits and vegetables. Things that are inflammatory are inflammatory for two reasons. One, the glucose-insulin pathway.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
But number two, the bacteria in our gut process and release byproducts of metabolism of certain things. And those byproducts, basically they're digestive products, can be very pro-inflammatory. Often you hear these anecdotal stories of, I eliminated tomatoes and my psoriasis got better.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
That person may have had an inability to tolerate tomatoes because of their gut microbiome's ability to digest the lycopene or whatever it is. We do know for certain that anti-inflammatory diets do improve skin health that are measurable and seen in clinic. So absolutely, absolutely. high protein, a complete protein.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
When I say complete protein, tends to be animal-based products, eggs, meat, chicken, fish, less so plant proteins just because of bioavailability and complete amino acid profiles. You want a high protein anti-inflammatory diet. That's number one. In terms of what you can introduce to your skin to improve one or two parameters, I don't think that's real.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Why I bring this up, we see a lot of talk and you've had a lot of people discuss collagen, for example. And this is an incredibly popular product in the skin world because its claim to fame is it does everything. It keeps you looking young, keeps your skin healthy, et cetera, et cetera. Well, we know collagen is essential to our skin health.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Literally, it's what our dermis is made of that give us our suppleness, our youth, no wrinkles, you know, things like that. Collagen is made of three amino acids, glycine, proline, and usually hydroxyproline or hydroxylysine. Those three amino acids are non-essential amino acids, meaning your body has the ability to synthesize these from sugars and fats that it eats.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
So collagen supplementation is not an essential protein, unlike glycine. animal proteins, which provide all 20 amino acids, including the essential ones your body cannot synthesize. Now, you may ask, okay, well, I see all these studies that suggest collagen supplementation improves skin health, skin appearance. There's several reasons for that. I don't think it doesn't.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
And that's due to several different reasons and release of messengers and messages. hormones and chemical mediators that do this. Long-term stress is usually mitigated or caused by cortisol. And everybody knows cortisol. It's the fundamental stress hormone of our body. It falls in the same family as drugs that we give like prednisone.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
I think there is some benefit. The question is, what are the confounding variables to this? Where the people in the studies... on restrictive diets because they were thinking about beauty and aesthetic? Were they restricting patterns of food, dietary food, things like that, in which they weren't getting a sufficient amount of protein source to begin with?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
So when they supplemented, we saw improvements in their skin. And a lot of these studies are patient recall or patient questionnaire studies in which there is inherent subjectivity and confounding variables in this.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
When people take an intervention that says, hey, you may look better or this may improve the appearance of your skin, not only do you have a placebo effect in saying, yeah, I do look better, you may also do other things during your day, change your behaviors and lifestyle to fit the goal that you subconsciously want. So that's one.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Number two, there is a component in, for example, collagen supplementation that is forgotten about quite a bit. And that's the increase in blood osmolality. And I learned this in the fitness world. I was really big into fitness in college, and it was my escape from life stressors.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
We found that people who supplemented with any powdered protein source, it doesn't matter, collagen, albumin, whey, and more so with people who supplement with creatine, that there is an increase in blood or plasma osmolality. So the solute concentration increase in the blood, which draws water in. That's predominantly how things like creatine make you look bigger.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
And I know we're going a little bit on a tangent, but... One of the reasons the way collagen works is your blood osmolality increases. You draw a little bit more water into the vessels, which plumps up the appearance of the skin. So there is a hydration component from the water draw, and this is measurable.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
You can draw a patient's blood after consuming collagen protein, whey protein, and see this spike in plasma protein. So there's that component as well, which is not truly a benefit, but it's an aesthetic benefit. And why that tends to be a problem is sometimes people who supplement with collagen end up actually having high blood pressure and they're otherwise healthy.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
And this was something that we saw in the fitness world a lot is that young college athletes, high school athletes that would come in, they would otherwise be completely healthy and would be running high blood pressures. If you took away their protein and creatine supplementation, their blood pressures dropped. And it's really fascinating stuff.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
And, you know, I used to work out at UCLA with one of the professors of FISAI, who was a really big dude. And we worked out together and we did all these studies and looked at, you know, young, otherwise healthy people. So that's one component. The other question is, do any of these food changes affect actually quantifiably increase skin collagen density, skin elastin density.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
There's no evidence that taking these things will traffic or meaning will go to where you want them to. Kind of silly to think if I drink this, it's going to go into my stomach, go into my intestine, be absorbed, and then know to go exactly to my cheek. Usually doesn't occur that way. And when we've looked at histologic comparison studies, the data is equivocal.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Some studies have shown a slightly increase in collagen density. And you wonder, are those patients one that are on restrictive diets to begin with? And then there are some studies that have shown there's really no density change in collagen and elastin. So the supplements really don't actually make a physical difference. Now, the other question is, is that study too short of term?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
How long do you stay on these? Data is wild. And there's a lot to understand. But we do know high protein, complete proteins, anti-inflammatory diets, absolutely critical for skin health.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Great question. I do supplement only in sun powder, which is my daily supplement. It contains bioactive collagen peptides. Aside from that, I think natural sources are better. So my wife cooks a lot at home, bone broth. Beef bone broth, chicken bone broth, a lot of animal meats.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
falls in the same family of cholesterol, testosterone, and estrogen, but cortisol does something very different. It breaks things down to allow our body to utilize it in times of stress. Because unfortunately, our body doesn't understand the difference between 21st century stress and old stress.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
My diet tends to be more in the, I guess, old school, you'd call it Atkins or keto diet, where I eat a lot of proteins and mostly fruits and vegetables. I'm not very restrictive, but I know that's what's made the biggest difference. I know that if I go on a sugar binge, in a few days, I'm breaking out. It's like clockwork for me. Some people are not as sensitive. My body is.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
And that's where the personalized medicine comes in.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Yes and no. Yes, there is some evidence that omega-3 supplementation tends to be better in fish form than non-fish formats. But omega-3s tend to be anti-inflammatory, so there's an improvement in skin health because of that. One thing we do see is they thin the blood, so people tend to bruise a little bit more.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
So actually, in my practice, I have people stop omega-3s before any sort of surgery because they bleed more.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Yeah. So two big categories. So we know the skin turns over, right? It turns over every 28 days. So in theory, if you keep turning the skin over, you can get rid of those mutations that occur in the skin that's stacking up and hope to bring out more vital, youthful skin that's not just appearing vital, but actually biologically healthier. And there's two categories of things you can do.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
The first is the family of retinoids. Amazing medications, amazing drugs, been around for 50 years. They come in oral form and topical form. And these increase the time or they shorten the time, they increase the skin turnover from 28 days to somewhere between seven to nine days. And in doing so, they've been shown to decrease skin cancer and pre-cancer formation.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
They've been actually shown to grow new collagen. They've been shown to increase elastin and appearance. And this has been histologically verified in study after study, meaning we take a biopsy of the skin, have them start a prescription retinoid, re-biopsy the skin and stain it for collagen or elastin, and you see a marked improvement. It's every dermatologist's well-known tool.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
And for some reason, it's still not well-known in the population. Its original indication was for acne and still is first line for acne because what it does is it dries out the oil glands. But in doing so, it also helps repair skin. So I recommend every single person to be on a prescription-strength retinoid, which is different than over-the-counter retinol.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
So us being chased by a lion to our body's messaging system is the same as meeting chronic deadlines at work. And what happens is cortisol is responsible for the breakdown of things like collagen and elastin, thinning of vessel walls, which allow our skin to look supple and healthy. So as we have a lot of stress and a lot of cortisol release, we see aging.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
And there's a lot of confusion, and I think the confusion is intentional in the cosmeceutical world as to why this is, but everybody should be on a prescription-strength retinoid. Usually topicals is all you need. The most common are things like tretinoin, adapalene, or tazeratine. And there's oral forms. The most common is Accutane or Isotretinoin.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
And to a lesser known drug called Acetretin or Ceriatane. And I usually reserve that for my high sun damage skin cancer patients. It really makes a difference. I'm going to touch back about retinol versus retinoids. So many, many years we studied retinoids. The way retinoids work is they activate transcription factors, they're nuclear messaging hormones.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
So these compounds bind retinoic acid receptors and they activate the transcription of certain genes. One of the genes we know that it can affect is the sonic hedgehog pathway and some of the embryologic genes. Why that's important is when we first studied retinoids in oral or cream version, we noticed that these can affect the development of a fetus.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
And they can be passed through breast milk and through sperm or semen. So because of this issue, the FDA regulated it very tightly. And it's pretty regulated worldwide because the effects are devastating. You know, missing arms, missing legs type of birth defect.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Because the medication was so effective and we saw an improvement in both quality and appearance of skin, the cosmeceutical beauty world said, oh, okay, this is awesome. We need to figure out a way to get this on the shelf, but not be a prescription. Out came retinols with an OL, which is the inactive version of retinoic acid, which is retinoids.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
And what has to happen is retinol needs to be converted in a two-step process to become active retinoic acid. Otherwise, it's a completely inactive prodrug, which is sold over the counter at concentrations that are not biologically active. That's how cosmeceutical companies can get away with prescribing this for people of childbearing age.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
In my opinion, if you want a retinoid, get a prescription for it. The over-the-counter stuff is not very effective, if at all. The shelf stability... Many studies have shown that almost all retinoids over the counter, retinols over the counter are basically unstabilized by one year. So you don't even know what you're paying for. The prescription is easy to get.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Everybody should be on it. Protects your skin, keeps you looking young, reduces skin cancer risk, grows new collagen. Literally the only consequence is that when you first start, your skin may be a little bit red or peely as the skin acclimates or turns over. Other than that, nothing.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Because that's a great question. So we hear so much about retinol. Every magazine you open that has anything you'll see like intensive night cream, intensive eye serum, regenerist eye repair, and all of them have retinol. None of them have retinoid or tretinoin for many reasons. Originally, it was made for acne.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
And the patients that came in to get them for acne were not necessarily in the same line of thought of premature aging and longevity.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
And there's accelerated aging studies that look at patients and people who are under high periods of stress. A great example of studies, we look at presidents. in which they appear to have aged much more rapidly than matched controls in a four-year period of time. So stress plays a really important role. You see it both immediately and long-term.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Yeah, Retin-A, exactly, or Accutane or Differin. These are the brand names for these products. So there was a disconnect between the people seeking the anti-aging effects and the people getting it as a prescription. That's one. And number two, as soon as cosmeceutical companies figured out a way to market over-the-counter inactive versions, that went haywire.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
So you can Google retinol, and there's a million things. When you Google tretinoin, you only hear about acne. So there's a little bit of a disconnect, much like all in medicine, between what docs know and think the population knows and what the population actually knows. But that's the one thing I think we've been doing a great job on in modern-day social media is advocating for these medicines.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
That's one realm of things that you can do to absolutely improve the quality of your skin, long-term health, appearance, actually revitalize the skin. Then there's a whole set of procedures that can be done that have been shown to improve not only the appearance, but actual biologic health. So that's where we fall into the laser world. And somebody who's been in photobiology
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
albeit a slightly different realm, you know the effects of light and the incredible changes that it can have in biology. Most of what we understand for lasers in medicine came out of dermatology studies. A lot of the understanding of laser biology came out of the Wellman Institute over at Harvard, where many of my colleagues are.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
And we now know that certain laser devices, certain resurfacing devices, not only improve the appearance of your skin, clinically they reduce your risk of skin cancer by 20%, maybe greater. And even more amazingly is when you do microarray gene studies, they actually activate the genes of more youthful, healthy skin cells that were quiescent as we age.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
So there's genetic verification, clinical verification, and aesthetic verification. These things are awesome. Laser is a big umbrella term. Some of the devices we use are not lasers. They're actually light, broadband light or intense pulse light. Some of them are lasers. Some of them are ablative. Some of them are non-ablative. And we get into the nuances of these things.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
But there are a few lasers that have been shown to make these dramatic differences. So if you're interested, I mean, see an expert.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Yeah, yeah. So laser resurfacing, it tends to be. And what's really popular, there's two forms of laser resurfacing. There's what we call non-ablative, meaning it doesn't burn or vaporize the top layer of skin. And then there's ablative resurfacing, which vaporizes the top layer of skin.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Obviously, ablative ones are much more aggressive, much more effective, a lot more downtime and a lot of riskier because you're literally peeling the face off or any part of the body. And it regrows without any scarring. That's also another beauty of the skin is you can literally peel it off entirely and have it regrow as if nothing ever happened.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Yeah. For ablative resurfacing, it's like once every five years or so on. It's pretty dramatic. And how long is the downtime? For ablative resurfacing, two weeks. Usually two weeks, you're pretty raw and sore. It's fallen out of favor in most big cities because of the downtime and the inherent risks, but it's still used in the right patient.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Non-ablative resurfacing, meaning it doesn't vaporize the top layer but drills holes into the dermis and targets certain parts of the epidermis without causing burn injury, that's become much more popular because the downtime is markedly less. People can go back to work and enjoy their activities. While having pretty much the same benefits, albeit a little bit less than ablative lasers,
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
These we generally recommend annually or biannually, depending on what you're trying to target. A large Harvard study just came out that showed that non-ablative fractionated laser resurfacing, particularly with a device called Fraxel, actually cuts your skin cancer risk by 20% because it eliminates those mutations and gets rid of those cells that had been collecting the stuff.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Your skin looks great, so keep doing what you're doing.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Look, your skin will tell you if something's wrong. So that's the first line. Now, you talk about dermabrasion or microdermabrasion, the good old St. Ives apricot scrub that every dermatologist frowns upon. But ironically, I use myself after a heavy workout at the beach and I'm all greasy, but don't get mad at me for using that stuff. The depth is key. So
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
when we do microdermabrasion or some sort of dermabrasion, the only thing we're really scraping off is really the stratum corneum, which is the highest layer of skin cells that don't even have a nucleus. They're dead skin cells. That's all you're scraping off. Whereas lasers target through the epidermis and into the dermis, and you control for that depth.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
And what you control for is the amount of heat energy delivered to that depth to target a certain thing. So In theory, what you describe in terms of dermabrasion is the same premise the old school ablative lasers do. They just fry everything off and you grow new skin. And in frying everything off, it fries off sun damage, wrinkles, precancers, and skin cancers.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
But in doing that, you're a bloody mess for a few weeks. Not popular for many reasons, but very effective. We did a ton of this at Stanford and we did a ton of the other one at Stanford. In my practice, I do a lot of laser work as well. The non-ablative stuff picks and chooses.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
That was the beauty of learning about laser and photobiology is how we target a certain structure and avoid damaging all the other ones. That the theory of selective photothermal lysis that came out of Rox Anderson's lab at Harvard, that was the game changer. We can now pick any appendage in the skin and find a way to target it and leave the rest undisturbed.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
So if you have broken blood vessels, you decide to use BPC-157 and it worked great and the blood vessels started to grow and you're like, I don't like the look of them. There is a laser that targets solely blood vessels.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
IPL is okay. IPL stands for intense pulse light. It's somewhat effective, but not very effective. The gold standard is what we call the pulse dilaser or the V-beam laser. And that is a 595 nanometer laser that targets oxyhemoglobin.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
I think they're very effective. I think they work great. The question is, to what extent is that improvement objective and measurable and what extent is subjective? That being said, there's a lot of evidence that shows that red light therapy improves vascular flow in the skin. We use it for things like hair restoration, post-procedure recovery, improvement in skin health after UV damage.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
We actually found a recent study that looked at red light therapy and irradiating mice. And if you pre-treat the mice with the red light therapy before they get UV exposure, compared to controls, the pre-treated group had much less of the changes with UV exposure. So very fascinating stuff. How it works, uncertain.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
We think a lot of it has to do with increased vascular flow, which is why a lot of times we recommend it for post-procedure. We recommend it for hair regrowth. There's some evidence that if you increase blood flow to the dermal papilla of the hair, it grows new hair. That's how minoxidil or Rogaine works. But I like it. I think it's a great product, a great group of products or devices.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
As a standalone product, uncertain as to how effective they are. And one of the reasons of the heterogeneity in the data are like so much difference is there's no regulation in terms of the energy, the density of light, the type of light, the duration of treatment. So some devices have high wattage, high energy output, high density of lights.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
They may be more effective than its equivalent counterpart. And until that gets defined, more uniform in accessibility, I don't know which device to recommend. I obviously have preferences one way or another, but there's so much on the market that's marketed as red light that is not effective and some stuff that's really good.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
I was gonna say the panels tend to be much higher in energy, much more effective. And most of the studies have looked at the big wall panels. The battery powered face masks just aren't powered enough to have much improvement. We do see some improvement when red and blue is used together, mostly for acne-prone skin because blue light alone has some antimicrobial properties.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
So when used in conjunction, you can get some improvement in actual skin illnesses. But the masks alone with just red light, most of them are not powered enough. They don't have enough energy, but there are some that are good. The wall panels tend to be better.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Juve is a good company. It's been around for a while. And, you know, most of the experts in laser and photobiology, you know, agree the panels are the way to go if you, if you want red light.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
For sure. It's why you see people have a glow after vacation, but you can't quantify that in a test tube or a lab. So in the immediate phase, there's a big shift in blood flow to the skin.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Yeah, yeah. Light has been around for a long time. I have a phototherapy unit in my practice in which we use narrow band ultraviolet B light to treat conditions like psoriasis, to treat conditions like vitiligo, There's a very strong immunomodulatory effect of light on the skin. It actually suppresses overactive immune activity. It can help increase vascularity in the skin.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
It can improve blood flow. So depending on the wavelength you pick and where it overlies on the absorption curves makes a big difference. It's interesting that we talk about light and as a skin cancer surgeon, this is always been interesting to me in that we use UV light to treat certain conditions and we assume UV light is purely pathogenic. And I don't think that's the case.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
And why I bring this up is one of the most common things we use light therapy for is patients with vitiligo, which is this autoimmune condition in which your immune system attacks the cells that produce our skin color. And the standard treatment is certain creams that suppress the immune system in the skin, phototherapy, eczema laser, which is a UV laser.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
And when you're feeling very stressed out immediately, there's a fight or flight response that constricts the blood vessels in our skin to shuffle them to muscles and places where we need to, our body thinks we need to utilize them more. That's why when people are really stressed out, they may look pale or gaunt. And we see that right away.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
And then now the new world of immunotherapies by pill form, the JAK inhibitors have made a huge difference. If we thought, and I go back on this tangent because the more we think about it, the less we know. If we think UV is truly deleterious, then patients with vitiligo should have a higher incidence of skin cancer. And in fact, the opposite is true.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
They have a lower incidence of skin cancer, even when you match them for amount of UV exposure over time. So it goes to tell us that there's so much about light and skin we don't understand, so much about sun and UV and skin we don't understand, and an incredible component about our skin's immune system that we're only now figuring out that play an important role.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Patients who have transplants, for example, Transplant patients in the early 90s, the number one cause of death for transplant patients that was not related to their transplant was metastatic skin cancer. And this was in patients who were strictly sun protected. So we talk about biology, photobiology, LED, UV, and skin health.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
And there's so much we don't know as we gather more data and look at populations and cohorts. So I don't know why I brought that up as a tangent.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Psoriasis is like the quintessential skin condition. I have it myself on my elbows and knees. And for about 100 years, it was thought to be a problem, a rash that is caused by too much skin turnover or excess skin proliferation. And for 100 years, we treated it the same way. We gave medicines that basically took the skin off, what we call keratolytics.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
We found that that wasn't very effective and some people can be hospitalized and it can be life-threatening if psoriasis involves the entire body. It usually looks like red patches or plaques with kind of a silvery scale on the surface and starts usually elbows and knees or the scalp, but can involve pretty much the entirety of the body.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
And what we found in the last 30 years with a lot of elegant studies and a lot of very, very nice basic science research is that it's actually due to overactivity of our skin's immune system. So there's overactivity of certain interleukins, which are these messengers that our immune cells produce, that makes the skin turnover faster than it should.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
And this epiphany was remarkable because we found that instead of targeting the skin, we can target the immune system and we can eradicate or treat psoriasis entirely. And in the 90s and early 2000s, that targeting was very crude. It was a very umbrella approach. We suppressed the entire immune system and ran into the consequences of that.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
And then as that builds up over time, the health, the actual quality of our dermis and fat deteriorate from chronic stress changes, mainly due to cortisol and its sibling hormones and messaging systems in our skin. So for sure, I mean, stress is like... something that is impossible to quantify in a lab measure, but very easily seen on exam.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
So medications that we gave for that increased risk for infections and, you know, skin cancers, et cetera. Now we have amazing drugs that target one or two molecules, messenger molecules of our immune system and clear up people's psoriasis. I mean, we have drugs now you take three times a year and you could have head to toe psoriasis and be completely clear. It tends to run in families.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
There is a very strong hereditary or genetic component to it. And it tends to be associated with arthritis, psoriatic arthritis. So psoriasis is like the quintessential skin condition that people see dermatologists and even rheumatologists for.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Yeah, I should probably backtrack. So psoriasis obviously comes in severity. There's mild disease, which majority of people have. There's moderate and severe.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
And generally speaking, the most common things that we treat mild psoriasis with is creams and lotions, moisturizers, sometimes low-potency topical steroids or high-potency topical steroids, and then things like carotidlytics, like salicylic acid, that take that excess scale off.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
We also know that because it's an immune inflammatory condition, that diet plays a big role in improving mild or moderate cases. And we also know that weight loss, plays a very big role in improving the appearance of psoriasis.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
So as we lose weight, as there's improvement in insulin resistance, and as we transition diets and lifestyles from inflammatory to anti-inflammatory, psoriasis tends to clear without any intervention needed, without any medical intervention needed.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
if there's still continued rashes and skin activity, then you'd look at topicals like cortisones, emollients like aquaphor and vaseline, things with some sort of acid or a retinoid to get rid of that excess scale. That's the fundamental cornerstone of treating psoriasis. And then when it gets bad, we talk about additional pharmacologic interventions.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Also, interestingly, one of the earliest conditions in which phototherapy was used is psoriasis. We know that when we shine UV light on the skin, that it suppresses the skin's immune system and clears psoriasis. And that's an excellent way to treat it without pharmacologic intervention, without any creams, pills, injections, or otherwise medication. It used to be used in the Dead Sea.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
People would go lather in the mud in the Dead Sea and sit out in the sun. And that was the first crude way to use phototherapy to treat psoriasis.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
So you can. Most dermatologists wouldn't recommend it. I think it's actually not a bad thing. My psoriasis clears in the summertime and flares in the wintertime. The problem with pure sunlight is that it's a mix of rays, right? There's X-rays, gamma rays, which generally don't penetrate the atmosphere. There's UVC, UVB, UVA, visible light, infrared light.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Just looking at your skin, I can tell you've had either a rough day. If you didn't sleep well, you can see it in your skin, in your eyes. So absolutely. I mean, that's why everybody likes to live a stress-free life. We see changes and improvement in skin health when people move away from that stressor, whether it's a physical stressor, emotional stressor, psychosocial stressor.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
That heterogeneous light, some have no improvement in psoriasis and some have great improvement. We were able to figure out which wavelengths make a big difference. It's around the 311, 312 nanometer range. sunlight does clear people's psoriasis up. That's why we see in northern latitudes where there's less sun intensity, the incidence of psoriasis is markedly higher than equatorial latitudes.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
And patients will say their psoriasis gets better when they're on a beach vacation. When they go back home, their psoriasis flares. There's also some component with vitamin D as well, but I think that's just secondary to the lack of UV exposure.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Yeah. So vitiligo is autoimmune, meaning your immune system is attacking itself. depigmentary skin disorder, meaning it's a condition in which your immune system attacks and kills the melanocytes, which are the cells that produce our skin's color. And we've found that it's an autoimmune condition from many basic science and elegant studies.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
It's also very closely associated with other autoimmune conditions. So patients tend to also have atopic dermatitis, autoimmune thyroid disease, autoimmune anemia. There's some sort of immune dyscrasia that involves vitiligo patients. And what happens is the immune system at first paralyzes these cells with immune activity attacking them. And over time, these cells no longer survive and die off.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
The cornerstone in treatment has always been some way to suppress the skin's immune response. Most of the time, the ligo tends to be focal, single areas, or segmental. Unfortunately, in certain cases, it can be whole body or completely depigmenting. Very uncommon, but we see this. We treat it by doing things that will help quiet the immune response in the skin.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
So topical creams, topical steroids, et cetera, topical calcineurin inhibitors, which are non-steroidal anti-inflammatory medications. We also use certain wavelengths of UV light to treat this, eczema laser at 308 nanometers, UVB, UVA.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
And then the renaissance in vitiligo has happened in the last three or four years with the identification of JAK inhibitors, which are these drugs that block the Janus kinase pathway. And we found that the JAK stat pathway plays a really important role in autoimmune mediation of melanocyte death.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
So new creams and actually oral medications have come out for patients who have very refractory vitiligo. The immune component is very fascinating because understanding immune biology and the immune system's effects on skin health comes from studying these patients. When patients have vitiligo, they lose all of their color.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
So you would assume that they're much more susceptible to sunburns, which they are. But when you look at incidence of skin cancers, they have a significantly lower incidence of skin cancer. And this is because of the immune phenomenon in immune surveillance of cancer. And that occurs throughout the body, but the skin is a model platform for this.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
There is actual quantifiable improvements in skin health, and that's pretty fascinating.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
What happens is your immune system surveys for mutant changes that occur, whether it's UV related, et cetera, infection, toxin, whatever. And patients who have vitiligo have overactivity of these immune cells and over surveillance. So they are able to clear a lot of these precancerous changes before they form into something.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
So that played a big role in not only understanding how to treat vitiligo, but some of our new medicines, actually the medicines that won the Nobel Prize in 2018 for treating melanoma came from understanding immune activity and cancer pathogenesis.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Yeah, the skin's a biosensor. The entire skin, hair, nails is a biosensor. So you can utilize the skin as the first barometer of illness. I mean, from acute illness to chronic illness. Acutely, you can see changes in just like looking, you know, with pallor, looking ghastly, things like that, but chronic illness as well.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
You know, when you used to go to the pediatrician and they would do this to look into your eyes, what they were looking for was the color of the conjunctiva. If it was white or pale, they knew you had iron deficiency. You know, when kids get hand, foot, mouth syndrome and they have a high fever, they lose their fingernails. When college students are stressed out, they lose their hair.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
The body's amazing ability to tell you it's under stress is shown in the skin, hair, and nails. What it does is it says, why am I wasting energy producing something that is not necessary because I'm fighting something else? Let's just shed this. And you can tell right away.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
I mean, we used to, in clinic when I'd see, you know, medical students or college students come in, I knew it was finals week. They'd come with clumps of hair. And as soon as finals week passed, usually took a few months, their hair grew back. It's awesome. The skin's a really cool biosensor and you can tell a lot.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Another quintessential derm problem that affects so many people, acne tends to be a condition that is bimodal, meaning we tend to see it in adolescence. We tend to see it in 25 to 35-year-olds. And for the unfortunate group of people that bridge that gap, we see it anywhere from 12 to 35.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Acne is a condition that's usually seen by pimples, you know, what we call blackheads or whiteheads, zits or boils. And it's thought to be caused by three important things. It's an overproduction of sebum, which is the oily stuff that comes out of your skin. And that's dictated by your hormones. Your hormones will increase the output of sebum.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
And that usually occurs in puberty, but can also occur if you're taking medications like prednisone, cortisol, testosterone, anything that is a hormone driver. So sebum is the first cause. Sebum is the food for the bacteria that cause acne. So as there's more food, the bacteria proliferate. And in proliferation, it recruits an immune response.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Your immune system says, hey, there's a little bit too much of these organisms. Let's go and take care of them. That's where you get that red zit. So in treating acne, you gotta treat all three components to get really effectively clear skin. Somehow reduce the sebum, get rid of the bacteria, and calm the immune system down. That's done with creams, oral medications, a combination of both.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Sometimes certain lasers can help eradicate the oil glands that feed the bacteria. But acne is a fascinating condition. Almost everybody will have it at some point in their life.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Yeah. So it's not the caloric deficit or the caloric surplus. It's the glycemic index or the amount of insulin response. So we know that high High glycemic index foods will make acne worse. And almost every study that we've looked at in sugary processed foods will flare your acne.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
There's some component of that inflammatory response that not only drives sebum production and bacterial growth, but actually worsens the skin's immune response. The skin's immune response is a little feisty when you're eating pro-inflammatory things. The other thing that I do hear a lot about is dairy. And there's this misconception that dairy causes acne.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
What we really see when we looked at a really cool study that was done out of Penn State is that it's not so much whole fat dairy products, but skim and nonfat dairy products that can make your acne flare.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
And the reason for that is that usually in the United States, there's an emulsifier that's put in nonfat or skim products to give the same mouthfeel as full fat so people feel like they're getting the same without the calories. And that has a glycemic response. So it's usually sugary foods, nonfat skim dairy products that will make your acne flare.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
So rosacea, commonly known as adult acne, tends to come in four flavors. The first form is the redness form, what we call erythematotelangiectatic form, or the ruddiness, broken blood vessels, redness of the cheeks, and flushing. That's by and far the most common form. There's also the papulopustular form, which is the pimple form, which is what we think about in adult acne.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
There's also the phymidus form, which is the enlargement of the nose that kind of looks like toad skin. We used to think it was a sign of alcoholism or sailors or construction workers that would have these enlarged nose. We thought it was a product of their environment that's actually a form of rosacea. And then there's ocular rosacea, which affects the eyes.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
By and far, the two most common that we see people in practice for is the redness form, redness and flushing, or the pimple form. You're absolutely right in that alcohol can contribute to it and worsen it for two reasons. One, alcohol itself is a vasodilator and acetaldehyde is a much more potent vasodilator. So when you drink, you flush.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Also, chronic impairment of the gut microbiome and lifestyle changes that make you drink more probably will exacerbate your rosacea. But things that trigger the redness include UV light because of vasodilation, spicy foods, hot beverages, emotions, life stressors, all the things that make you flush. what triggers the breakouts is a little bit different.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
And why that's important is how we treat them. So what triggers breakouts is thought to be both organisms that live on our skin, including bacteria and certain mites, but also immune dysregulation in our skin. That we don't really understand or just now elucidating how the immune system in the skin becomes dysfunctional to show those breakouts. In terms of treating redness,
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
We have some creams that are okay at temporarily blanching those vessels out, but they're not great and they're temporary. We don't have great treatments for them, but we have great lasers for redness. So when patients come to see me for redness or any dermatologist for redness, generally there's a discussion about laser destruction of those blood vessels.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
When we talk about breakouts or pimple form of rosacea, we have excellent medications in terms of both creams and oral medications that suppress both the bacterial and mite growth as well as the immune response in the skin. So you kind of have to take a look at what form you have and what will be the best treatment. Eczema.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Umbrella term for what we generally consider as atopic dermatitis or what used to be colloquially termed as sensitive skin in childhood. And that's a very prominent skin condition also dictated by the immune system, but in two forms. Eczema tends to be caused by three major prongs. The first prong is a genetic barrier defect in the skin.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
So patients with eczema tend to have a microscopic weave of their skin that's not as tight as somebody without eczema, and that's usually defined by a gene called filaggrin. That's the first reason to develop eczema. The second reason is an environmental allergen or trigger that's able to get through these weaves easier because of this genetic change.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
The third thing is an aberrant immune response to these triggers. So patients with eczema tend to have an immune system that responds a little bit more vigorously or overactively to the same environmental trigger, probably because there's more trigger getting in through the barrier defect than somebody who doesn't. So the cornerstone in treating eczema is treating these three things.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Why dermatologists make a big stink about moisturize, moisturize, moisturize for eczema is to seal that barrier with a moisturizer because we're basically putting the mortar back in between the bricks, which are the skin cells, to seal the skin off to not allow the environmental allergen to get in. That's the first. The second is to avoid environmental triggers.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
So fragrances, preservatives, seasonal allergies, pollens, things that trigger that immune response, we try to mitigate. Now, obviously, trying to control environmental pollens is hard, but using things like we talked about earlier, fragrance-free cleansers, fragrance-free detergents, fragrance-free...
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
That's a good question. So caffeine is a known vasoconstrictor. Fortunately, when it's consumed in quantities that we have in coffee, tea, and equivalent beverages, the amount that affects the tiny capillaries and arterioles in our skin is minute and transient. So you may get a transient vasoconstriction with high caffeine intake, but usually there's a compensatory vasodilation as a result.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
skincare products, non-preservative-based skincare products will mitigate the environmental triggers. And then the third thing is just calming the immune system down. And that can be done in a variety of ways. Most commonly, it's topical medications like topical steroids that dampen the immune system in the skin.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
And when eczema is really, really bad, there are biologic medications that control certain interleukins. And they've made an incredible advancement in eczema control. People, we can control patients for life with some of these injectable medicines.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Yeah, totally. So it's, I mean, it's very gratifying and you want to do it. There's like some subconscious desire to like pop a pimple. I have it myself. Anytime I see a pimple, I'm like, man, I got to, I want to get at this.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
You know, even if it's not an infection, I think possibly like a, like a evolutionary reason. Yeah. Very, very possible. Yeah. The reason we don't want to do that and the reason why we always say don't pick at your skin is when there's an immune response in the skin, the immune system is trying to fix something and fight something. And in doing so, it recruits different enzymes.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
The most common enzyme is what you exactly described, matrix metalloproteinases, which are these enzymes that eat apart collagen and elastin to allow it to remodel. When you cause physical trauma in the skin, you recruit a much larger immune response than what was warranted for that insult.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
So these MMPs, these matrix metalloproteinases, enter at a much higher amount and they eat away at the collagen and elastin. That's what leaves an acne scar. Now, people are gonna pop their pimples, whether we want to or not. So if you're gonna do it, I don't recommend it, but if you're gonna do it, Generally, what we recommend is if there is no tip, don't even think about it.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
If there is a small white tip and not much pain or induration, you can use a warm compress to see if you can soften that and see if it'll expel itself. Pushing, we don't recommend. Stretching can sometimes unroof a pimple, tends to cause less trauma. But again, if you listen to one thing, don't do it.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Don't use any hydrogen peroxide. It's a common misconception thinking it fights things. Peroxide doesn't let wounds heal. It just kills anything living. So no peroxide and no topical antibiotics that are over the counter. Most of these don't have any antibiotic properties anyway because most organisms are resistant to them because of the widespread availability and use.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
And two, they cause a lot of allergic contact, dermatitis, and rashes in people who are susceptible to them. So we just say if it pops on its own, leave it alone. You may want to put a little ointment on there if you have a sore, but otherwise, ignore it.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
So a common thing we see a lot of people for, it's like a day before their wedding or a day before a big social event, they have a zit on their forehead and they say, you know, what can you do for me? I need this gone. So exactly like we talked about, topical corticosteroids and to a greater extent injectable intralesional corticosteroids suppress the immune response temporarily.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
So you can use them... cautiously if you have an event within the next day or two. Long-term use, it causes multiple problems. It causes thinning of the skin and can increase the risk of the acne scar forming. And you can have rebound acne from topical steroids used all over the face. Oftentimes, we see a lot of people who are in the public eye asking for steroid injections of their acne.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
So the effects on skin are not as dramatic as people may make it seem. Now, one thing that we do see, and it's a little unclear as to why, is that people who have chronic high caffeine intake tend to produce more sebum in their skin. And it may be a result of vasoconstriction, may be a result of something that we don't understand that's compensatory as a result of those changes. So
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
I, as a surgeon, usually see a lot of the consequences of that, so I tend not to utilize steroid injections for acne. The reason for that is if you place just a little too much, and we're talking less than 0.1 milliliter difference, you can have a permanent atrophic divot in the skin that is only fixed by surgery.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
So I see a lot of young patients that come in who had an acne spot injected here, and now that divot is left and that's permanent. If it's going to be done, it should be done by a dermatologist who knows what they're doing. Low concentrations, usually bottom half of the face can be effective in getting rid of a really bad pimple that needs to be gone immediately. You just got to know the risks.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
No, I don't think so. I think tattoos are an awesome form of art and I think it used to be linked to stereotypes that are no longer true. I think the challenge with tattoos is two things, making sure that what is being placed underneath the skin is not an allergen. We see this mostly with the reds that use cinnamates. They produce a lot of granulomatous reactions or foreign body reactions.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
One, making sure obviously they're using clean, safe equipment that's sterile. You know, you don't want the bloodborne pathogens. The real challenge is surveying for growths. In patients who have a lot of tattoos, it's hard to see small skin cancers form or changes in moles because usually the tattoos are of dark color. So, the surveillance part becomes a little bit more challenging.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
So, if you have a lot of tattoos, just make sure to see your dermatologist and somebody who feels comfortable and confident in screening. But other than that, no. They've been around for hundreds and hundreds of years, and I think they're fine if done correctly.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Melanoma, yeah.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
That's a great, great question. So obviously there are many forms of skin cancer, but the three most common, like we talked about, basal cell carcinoma, squamous cell carcinoma, and melanoma. There are other types like Merkel cell and et cetera, but they're far less common.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Now, historically, melanoma has been our number one killer for skin cancer until about a few years ago, around 2018, when the Nobel Prize was won for the new drugs that treated melanoma. This year, we expect three times as many deaths in the United States from squamous cell carcinoma than we do melanoma, but nobody talks about that.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
We lose a patient every about 62 minutes to melanoma, but one every 37 minutes to squamous cell carcinoma. First and foremost, the thing that you wanna look for in terms of skin cancer risk and predisposition is look at family history. Your family history and your genetics plays the largest role in predisposition for skin cancer development.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
If you can gather a family history, you can understand your risk in developing it and it can help dictate your screening. Now, if you can't get a family history or you don't know your family history, not a problem. Generally, we recommend an annual skin exam by a good reputable board certified dermatologist.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
And that includes every square inch of your skin, including your hair, between your toes, in the genital area. We can develop a skin cancer anywhere. Bob Marley died of a melanoma on his toenail. that was thought to be a soccer injury. Jimmy Buffett died of a Merkel cell carcinoma, one of these rare types that occur in sun-exposed areas. Anybody can get them.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
a lot of people who consume coffee may experience a little bit oilier skin that being said the data is equivocal as to whether or not caffeine has a deleterious beneficial or net neutral effect on the skin i drink a lot of coffee i haven't found that the vasoconstriction is something that's noticeable but
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Obviously, there's predispositions in high-risk populations, but it's such an easy, non-invasive exam to do that everybody should get one at least once a year. The other reason why I bring this up is skin cancers can develop in sun protected areas. One of the areas that I see a rapid increase in skin cancer development is in genital areas and in the mouth due to HPV.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
And we see this a lot in younger and younger patients. Probably in the last month, I've operated on six or seven young patients under the age of 40 with squamous cell carcinomas caused by HPV in the genital region. This is obviously not sun-driven. It's not something you can put sunscreen or take a product to protect you from, but it's something that's easily monitored or surveyed.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
So I would say at the very minimum, get a family history or a personal history, get an annual surveillance exam. If you have a lot of moles, I used to direct the Pigmented Lesions and Melanoma Clinic. This is something that was really hard for a lot of dermatologists and patients to follow when they're covered with moles, see which one is changing.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
there are tools that can be utilized, including whole body photography, mole mapping, and some new AI-based softwares that basically track the moles and look for changes as you feed the software more and more pictures from the patients. It's fascinating.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
A lot of the stuff is developing from our, well, I should say my alma mater, but up at Stanford is these AI-based software apps that allow us to survey some of the most challenging patients. So if you have a lot of moles... your screening may be more than once a year. If you have a lot of moles, you inherently have a slightly increased risk for melanoma.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Now, we always use these terms interchangeably, melanoma, skin cancer, basal, squamous, et cetera. Importantly to know for every one melanoma, there's 10 non-melanoma skin cancers. That's namely basal cell and squamous cell. About 5 million Americans will be diagnosed with one of the non-melanomas this year alone. 5 million. 5 million. It's a big number. Yeah, it's about one in four.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
One in four Americans at some point in their lifetime will develop a skin cancer, encroaching one in three Americans by the end of 2030. So it's a lot. Majority of these are not life-threatening, but they're functionally and cosmetically disfiguring. They arise on sun-exposed areas, so surveillance is really important.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Yeah, great question. So we are seeing HPV become a real problem in many cancers in the body, not just the original cervical cancer, which was the number one killer in young women for cancer until the vaccine came out. but we're seeing it now as the number one cause of throat cancer in young adults and sexually active adults.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
There are people who have different skin types, patients who have rosacea, for example, who are much more sensitive to those changes. They may notice that change in the color in the vasoconstriction more with caffeine consumption. What used to be thought was that caffeine itself was a problem for flushing and redness.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Significantly increased risk of squamous cell carcinomas in sun-protected areas, immunosuppressed patients. The vaccine, the Gardasil vaccine, which treats or builds immunity to HPV, covers the strains that cause cancer, 16, 18, 31, 33, and so on. I recommend anybody who is either sexually active or anybody who, you know, in population, literally anyone, should get vaccinated.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
The new guidelines have extended the age up until, I think, late 40s for both men and women. It used to be only for young women because the cervical cancer risk, but now we've found that so many things are implicated with HPV that the... On label use is up to the late 40s. So if you have any concern, I highly recommend getting the vaccine.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Yeah. So HPV comes in about 200 strains or like 190 strains. Strains one, two, and four, for example, cause warts on the hands and feet. What you see like gym goers and kids, they get warts. HPV six and 11, for example, cause genital warts. HPV strains 16, 18, 31, and 33 cause cancer. The question is, when you get something, does it come with its brothers or its siblings?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
And that's the question we don't know. The vaccine was made to treat high-risk strains, but because of cross-antigenicity, we see that patients who get vaccinated, their warts go away. And we saw this in the hospital in transplant patients who were covered with warts because of their immunosuppressed effect. When we would vaccinate them, their warts would get better.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Yeah, transplant patients and anybody who is immunosuppressed, they have a tough time fighting plantars warts, finger warts, any sort of viral-based condition because their immune system is suppressed from medications or otherwise. So they usually have a tough time fighting these things. They have a higher incidence of a lot of things, but the vaccine was cool in eradicating it.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Now, I'm not saying go get a vaccine because you have a plantar wart. That's silly and overkill. Usually, you know, warts we treat with, you know, freezing, in-office procedures, easy things, but... Planters' warts can be burnt out. Yeah, we burn them or freeze them or scrape them, use a little medication, but...
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
The vaccine does improve some of the burden of disease, even though it doesn't target that strain.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
I think we're on the forefront. And the term vaccine is a... really big umbrella term.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Yeah, I know. It's going to garner a lot of questions. I think, yes, absolutely. There was a new study that showed that an mRNA vaccine, and that is already pretty controversial, was shown to improve melanoma survival after surgery and chemotherapy. So the goal of all these things is to prime your immune system and and have the immune system know what to target.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
And now we've realized it's actually not so much the caffeine because the concentration that reaches the skin is so minuscule. It's actually the temperature of the beverages we drink. So hot beverages can affect the color of your skin, can make you flush more, make the redness more pronounced. Cold beverages tend not to have that effect.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
It's to teach the immune system, hey, this is bad. Next time you see this, go attack it. It's like showing a bloodhound a steak and then going on the hunt. The bloodhound now knows what to scent for and what is normal and what isn't. So the vaccines have a lot of controversial things. I think for medicine and cancer biology, it's going to be revolutionary. We see it for brain tumors.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
We see it for glioblastoma. Incredible changes with dendritic cell vaccines. We see it for melanoma now. And in the future, it may be used for all skin cancers with an asterisk, depending on how much we can activate the immune system to target it.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
Thank you for the opportunity. I'm incredibly grateful to be here. I think teaching is really important. Having evidence-based discussions is really important. Challenging dogma is also important, done in the right way, in the evidence-based way. I love what I do. I love everything about the skin. I love seeing patients and also challenging things. the status quo on certain things.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
So thank you for the opportunity. It's been a lot of fun. There's a lot to talk about in skin. We can probably talk for a decade if you let me, but I appreciate it. Thank you.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
So it used to be an old adage in people who had like rosacea, for example, we'd say, don't drink coffee, don't drink tea. It's actually the temperature of the beverage, not so much the caffeine content.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance | Dr. Teo Soleymani
So nicotine, great question. It is a known vasoconstrictor. Now, the concentration of nicotine when smoked is higher in the skin because of inhalational effects and the local effect of nicotine on our skin. So you do see a measurable vasoconstriction in the skin that becomes a problem, which is why patients who smoke age faster.