By BARBARA BROCKWAY, MATHIAS GEMPELER
ABSTRACT: Climate change is beginning to impact all aspects of our lives including our skincare needs. This has prompted the development of “climate-adaptive” products and routines. Here we discuss climate change, the pressure to adapt skincare and the beauty industry, to meet the challenges ahead.
Weather, Climate and Climate Change
What is all the fuss about climate change and global warming when the weather outside is just as I expected? Consider for a moment, the weather where you are today. Whatever you are experiencing is mostly determined by hard to predict, interdependent variables such as air pressure, temperature, humidity and wind-speed, which all take place within the troposphere (the layer of Earth’s atmosphere that runs from the earth’s surface to a height of about 6–10 km) (1). People living in England near London, expect the summer to be warm and relatively dry, but in 2024, it was cold and wet, and this triggered discussions about sport being disrupted and how it always rains during Wimbledon tennis (2). Anecdotal or not, this observation is an excellent example of a short-term weather pattern. Climate on the other hand, describes averaged weather patterns for a given area over a long period of time, which typically is over 30 years or more.
Small changes in global temperatures can have large effects on local climates. Increasing global temperatures will make hotter days more likely and more intense, and experts do not consider the average global temperature increase of 1.1° C since 1880, to be small. More frightening still is that most of this warming (a rate of around 0.15-0.2 °C per decade) has happened since 1975 (3). As with all averages for global parameters, parts of the world, especially those with micro-climates such as on mountains, in valleys, forests and cities etc., will experience much higher or lower temperatures than the mean values. For example, Switzerland has warmed above the global average by 2.8 °C in the past 150 years (4). At the beginning of September 2024, it was announced that Switzerland had lived through the second hottest August since measurements began 160 years earlier (5).
