Dr. Tarbox: Hello and welcome to "Skincast," the podcast for people to learn about skincare. I'm Michelle Tarbox. I'm a dermatologist in beautiful sunny Lubbock, Texas. And I'm being joined by . . .
Dr. Johnson: I'm Luke Johnson, dermatologist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Dr. Tarbox: So we're making this podcast to help educate people about how to take the very best care of their skin, and we plan to release an episode every two weeks. On this podcast, we will mention specific skincare products that we have found in our medical opinion to be very helpful and beneficial to our patients. We are not sponsored in any way or supported by any of the manufacturers of these products.
Dr. Johnson: Nope, but we are medical doctors.
Dr. Tarbox: I like it. Dermatologists are medical doctors who specialize in the care of the skin and of the hair and the nails. We're going to talk about skincare in the COVID era. So, Luke, what do you think is the most important aspect of skincare in this very unusual time we're all living through?
Dr. Johnson: Well, everybody is washing their hands a lot more because of the Coronavirus, which I think is a good idea. But a lot of people have noticed that their poor hands just get so dry and chapped afterwards. We say they have irritant contact dermatitis. Dermatitis, inflammation of the skin, because of contact with an irritant, in this case water. And it's helpful to know what to do if your poor hands get all dry and chapped.
Dr. Tarbox: And that definitely can happen in this day and age when we're all having to clean our hands very frequently. I think now more than ever it's really important to have a good skin care regimen that helps protect the integrity or the intactness of your skin, because our skin is important. It helps to protect us from the world, from bacteria, and viruses, and chemicals, and so we need to take the very best care of it. So what's your favorite moisturizer, Luke?
Dr. Johnson: Well, I love just plain old petroleum jelly. The brand name is Vaseline, but you can buy just the generic brand petroleum jelly. It's great for so many reasons. I have written a small love letter to Vaseline. It doesn't rhyme or anything. But first of all, it's super cheap, especially if you buy the generic version. You can get a big tub of it for about $3. It does a great job moisturizing the skin. So, in dermatology, we talk about transepidermal water loss, the water loss through the skin, and petroleum jelly prevents 99% of it. Also, nobody gets allergic to petroleum jelly. Love it.
Dr. Tarbox: It's easy to find, most people have access to it, and it works very well. Now, I know some people aren't always comfortable using petroleum jelly for various reasons. So, if you're one of those people, and we just can't convince you with our passionate love of Vaseline, we can . . .
Dr. Johnson: It's great.
Dr. Tarbox: It is fantastic. But we can recommend some other things as well. For some patients who don't want to use Vaseline or petroleum jelly, the nut butters may be beneficial. So shea butter can be helpful. Some of my patients have liked a product called Waxelene, which is actually derived from beeswax and is sort of a crunchy granola replacement for Vaseline or petroleum jelly. But the important thing is just to use it regularly.
Dr. Johnson: Waxelene?
Dr. Tarbox: Waxelene. I know. That's what it's called. You can find that usually in health food stores or Whole Foods markets.
Dr. Johnson: What I tell my patients often is that I know Vaseline is not for everybody. It's kind of messy and greasy. So, if you don't like it, use something you like. So just find the thickest, greasiest thing that you kind of like putting on your skin. In general, things that you have to scoop out of a jar are going to be more effective than things that squirt out of a bottle.
Dr. Tarbox: I kind of love that analogy, and that's definitely true. So you want your lotion that you're going to use to moisturize your hands in this unusual time to be more like icing and less like chocolate syrup. So when we are talking about moisturizers, if you're wanting to use something that's more of a cream, there are several over-the-counter products that I think Luke and I can agree on are very helpful to the skin and are very minimally irritating, so they don't have any excess fragrances or harsh preservatives.
The products that I like the most are a moisturizer called Vanicream. So Vanicream is a product line that's made for patients who have contact allergies to different things, chemicals, dyes, or fragrances. You can buy those at Walgreens, and they're not terribly expensive. I also like something called CeraVe cream. Another thing you can buy at most pharmacies, most drugstore pharmacies, are easy to find, is not too expensive. And again, it is not a fragranced product. There's also a very important oil type substance that's in CeraVe, which is a ceramide, and that's one of the oils our skin naturally makes to hydrate itself. So replacing that with a product like CeraVe can be a very good strategy. Any other moisturizers you like? Dr. Johnson: Well, if people don't buy into Vaseline, I usually don't have anything specific in mind. But the point of all this is not just to make your hands feel better, though it will. But there is a little bit of concern amongst some dermatologists that if you've developed little cracks in your skin, that could actually be a portal of entry for the Coronavirus. So the Coronavirus likes to attach to certain proteins in order to get into cells and those proteins might be present in those cracks in your hand. We call those fissures. So helping them to heal up is important, and these moisturizers will help that happen.
Dr. Tarbox: Absolutely. Now, a lot of people are using hand soap to wash their hands. Your choice of soap is also very important. Some soaps are going to really strip the natural oils from the skin, and others may be irritating because of fragrance or chemical content. So using a soap that's designed to be gentle is a good choice. What's your favorite?
Dr. Johnson: Well, as far as I can tell, the party line among dermatologists across the world is white Dove bar soap. Everyone seems to really like it.
Dr. Tarbox: I like that one. I also like . . . Vanicream makes a bar soap as well that's very hypoallergenic. Another good product is CeraVe Hydrating Cleanser. This is a cleanser that won't foam. It doesn't have the ingredient that makes soaps foam, which is usually something called sodium lauryl sulfate, which can be a little bit more dehydrating to the skin. But you don't actually need the foam to cleanse. It's just something we associate with cleanliness. So that's a great product as well and it's very gentle.
Dr. Johnson: Though I'll admit at my home I use just random generic liquid soap because my hands don't seem all that sensitive, but I do put moisturizer on them afterward.
Dr. Tarbox: It's a good idea. There's also, of course, hand sanitizer that people are using. And remember that it has to have a certain percentage of alcohol in it for it to be effective against the Coronavirus. Now, alcohol is naturally dehydrating. That's one of the ways that it actually works against enveloped viruses like the coronavirus. But that same property where it can be dehydrating can make it a little bit hard on your skin.
So there are some hand sanitizers that have a moisturizing element. If your hand sanitizer does have that moisturizing element, you still want to make sure it has a high enough alcohol content to actually kill the virus. Some other sanitizers might be heavily fragranced and that might not necessarily be as beneficial. Dr. Johnson: And of course, in general in terms of the Coronavirus, as you'll hear everywhere, if you can avoid touching your face, that's great. In dermatology, we learned that people just touch their faces all the time for no good reason. In fact, I think I touched mine over the past two minutes like five times. So just bear in mind that there could be dirt or other nasty things on your hands that you don't want to put on your face.
Dr. Tarbox: Yeah, I think that it's something that we all have to kind of monitor our subconscious activities with and really try to pay attention to that behavior and stop it before it potentially transmits a virus we really don't want to deal with.
I know some of my patients have actually been dealing with some fissures in their hands from consistent washing of the skin. How do you like to heal up those fissures, Luke? Dr. Johnson: Well, we mentioned moisturizers in general earlier, but this is a special spot where my favorite Vaseline really outperforms. So something nice and greasy will help it heal. Wounds heal best when they're kept moist and greasy. So I've talked to a number of patients who have said, "Won't my wound heal better if I leave it to dry?" And it's interesting because the medical community used to feel that that was the case. But something like 20 years ago, we realized it's not. If it's moist, then the new skin cells can crawl across the surface more easily. So, if you remember hearing, "You should leave your wounds dry for them to heal," that's outdated knowledge. Now, keep them greasy with Vaseline.
Dr. Tarbox: I like to think of it like trying to regrow a dead patch in a yard. So, if you think about where you've got your grass and you want it to grow back over a place where the grass has been lost for some reason or another, is it going to grow better if you have a nice moist soil that's easy for the grass to grow back through? Or is it going to grow best if you have hard, dry dirt?
Dr. Johnson: I do not have a green thumb, but I'm guessing the moist one.
Dr. Tarbox: Exactly. So I think that that's a very important thing now.
Another area that people are struggling with skin changes in, in this unusual time, is the area of the face covered by the mask. And it's created something called the dreaded maskne, which I have personally dealt with as a healthcare person and have also treated in my patients. So what do you think are the best ways to help avoid maskne, Luke? Dr. Johnson: Just don't wear a mask.
Dr. Tarbox: Ah, ba-dum.
Dr. Johnson: No, a joke. I mean, I guess if you can avoid wearing a mask because you are staying at home or whatever, that's fine. But masks are pretty important to prevent the spread of the Coronavirus, so they're a necessary evil. Avoiding other stuff that's on your face under the mask, specifically makeup. So I admit I don't wear a lot of makeup.
Dr. Tarbox: What?
Dr. Johnson: But it seems to me that if you are going to be wearing a mask anyway, then why put makeup on the part of your face that's going to be covered? It can exacerbate the problem. It also kind of messes up the masks and makes them harder to reuse if we end up needing to do that.
Dr. Tarbox: I agree. I've actually taken this whole time as a little permission to be a little less involved with my beauty routine. So while I'm paying very good attention to my skin health, and I'm trying to kind of baby that skin and be gentle with it, I'm really not using makeup hardly at all, because what's the point? It's underneath the mask and no one is going to see it. So I don't understand why I would do that anyway.
I like to tell patients to lay a good foundation. So before you put your mask on in the morning, I think it's a great idea to wash your face. That can help prevent dirt and oil on your skin from getting trapped under the mask and worsening your breakouts. So you want to put a mask over a clean face and you want to use a clean mask if at all possible. The gentlest masks are going to be 100% cotton, and something that you can wash. Hopefully, you will have enough of them that you can wear a clean mask every day, and then launder them as often as you might need to. Dr. Johnson: How do you wash your mask, Michelle? Do you just throw it in the washing machine with everything else?
Dr. Tarbox: The masks that I've had, I've had some that have actually been made by people in my community, who are just wonderful, lovely volunteers. So, in my free time, I actually enjoy participating in community theater. And when this whole outbreak began, the seamstresses and costumers that are a part of the theater made this beautiful effort and sewed all of these fantastic masks out of 100% cotton and then took them to the hospitals and gave them to the doctors and nurses there. And I thought that was a wonderful thing that they did. I found that just washing them like you would wash normal clothes is a very appropriate way to take care of them.
If the liner of the mask is a softer fabric, occasionally a dryer might make it fuzzy and that would make it itchy. So you may want to air dry a mask that has that kind of liner. But if it's just a normal woven, 100% cotton fabric, just washing and drying it with normal detergent is a good plan. Now, the detergent is important. So just like you want to use a gentle cleanser on your hands or on your face, you want to use a fragrance-free detergent in your wash because we're now more than ever putting our most sensitive skin immediately next to something that's been put through the washing machine. So you want to use a fragrance-free detergent that's gentle. My favorite one is All Free Clear. Which one do you like, Luke? Dr. Johnson: I like that one, and I like the Costco version of it. I don't remember what it's called. Kirkland brand Free and Clear, or something like that.
Dr. Tarbox: I found that the Tide cleansers are a little bit more harsh to the skin, and even their Tide Free and Clear still causes problems for me and some of my patients. So I tend to avoid that one.
Dr. Johnson: Sometimes it's not time to do laundry and I still want to wash my mask. So we've just washed them by hand just with a little bit of laundry detergent on our fingers, or wash them in the kitchen sink and then put them in the dish dryer to dry. That seems to work okay.
Dr. Tarbox: I think that's a great way to do that. And then you also want to make sure that if you are having to wear a mask every day, your skin can get really irritated. There are some adaptations that you can make. Some of the masks tie behind the headset instead of behind the ears. So potentially altering the style of mask you wear day to day might help protect that skin behind your ears. There are also little straps or buttons on headbands to clip behind the head that will hold the ear loops of the mask.
Dr. Johnson: And for anybody out there who's an aspiring dermatology nerd, there are medical, fancy terms for all this stuff. So the medical term for maskne is Acne Mechanica, and it can also occur with anything else that's sort of rubbing or lying on the skin. I know it's seen in military recruits who have to wear backpacks all the time, for example. And then the medical term for your poor sore earlobes after you've been wearing a mask all day is acanthoma fissuratum. There you go. We make up words to sound smarter than we are.
Dr. Tarbox: Science! So, before this outbreak, the most common place that I would see what we call maskne, what we technically call Acne Mechanica, was in my football players who were wearing chin straps and masks because they were playing football. And it being Texas, you see a lot of that.
Dr. Johnson: And the other thing I think is that's helpful to know is if you do get some of the acne stuff onto your mask, one of my favorite over-the-counter products is benzoyl peroxide. It's in a lot of acne treatment products. So look for that particular ingredient. It comes in a lot of different ways. It comes as little spot treatment pads or gels or cleansers. I kind of like it as a cleanser, because I figure you're washing your face anyway, might as well put some medicine in there, but it works fine as a spot treatment if you just have one or two spots.
It can be a little bit irritating to the skin. My skin doesn't seem to care, so I just use whatever is cheapest. But if your skin is a little bit more sensitive, a couple of specific brands that are very gentle . . . there's one called Acnefree, all one word. And then CeraVe, same company you mentioned about moisturizers, makes an acne foaming cream cleanser with 4% benzoyl peroxide that's also very gentle. Watch out: Any product with benzoyl peroxide will bleach your towels. Dr. Tarbox: It will bleach your towels.
Dr. Johnson: And potentially your clothing.
Dr. Tarbox: And if you have lighter colored hair, it can get your hair.
So I think those are all great products. If your skin is too sensitive to tolerate benzoyl peroxide, there's another great product that I like. It's Cetaphil foaming acne wash and it has zinc sulfate in it. So zinc is good for the skin and it's helpful to combat acne, and the Cetaphil acne wash has that ingredient, which is helpful. If you're not tolerating the benzoyl peroxide, you could potentially use that. Dr. Johnson: And I want to agree with everybody that the Coronavirus sucks. I'm sick of it.
Dr. Tarbox: One hundred percent. It is not our favorite thing. If you are treating the acne, you want to be a little bit more gentle than you normally would be. So I wouldn't go for the mega acne control hot lava cream. Use the sensitive skin products right now. Take it a little bit easy on your skin.
I'm really grateful to our institutions for helping to support us in giving these podcasts and providing information to our patients and to the general public. So I'm very pleased to be a physician at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center in beautiful sunny Lubbock, Texas. And I know Luke's institution is very lucky as well. Dr. Johnson: Yes, I'm very proud to be part of the University of Utah Department of Dermatology. It's a great place to live, Salt Lake City. It's great place to work. And if you are a super dermatology nerd and are interested in sort of some of the research behind it, Michelle and I have another podcast. It's called "Dermasphere" and it's really intended for dermatologists. Maybe you're a dermatologist. What do I know? But maybe you're just dermatologically curious. If so, you can check out "Dermasphere" on your podcast platform as well.
Dr. Tarbox: Well, we'll be releasing a new episode in two weeks and we hope to see you there. Thank you for learning with us about the skin today here at "Skincast."
