Some cleansers make the skin feel “tight” and some moisturizers make the skin feel “soft.”

Reinhold H. Dauskardt and colleagues traced the mechanisms by which applying cleansers or moisturizers to the skin results in such sensations, using in-vitro biomechanical testing, computational neural stimulation modeling, and self-assessment surveys completed by thousands of participants.

The application of a topical treatment can alter the state of specific skin layers, activating cutaneous mechanoreceptors that then feed information forward to slowly adapting type I (SAI) neurons and then on to the central nervous system.

Changes that can initiate such neural cascades include drying cleansers that cause contraction of the outermost skin layer known as the stratum corneum—or swelling of that same layer upon the application of creams or lotions.

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