The Complex Relationship Between Us, our Skin, and its Microbiota via The Secret Life of Skin

Thanks to advancements in sequencing technologies and functional studies, our knowledge of the skin microbiota and how it relates to us, the host, and the health of our skin, is constantly improving. We now understand that individual microbes are neither simply beneficial or harmful to us, but that a complex balance must be achieved to maintain homeostasis between our skin and its resident microbes. This balance involves dynamic interactions of the skin not only with the microbes themselves, but also their metabolic products as well as the external environment, host factors, and the interplay of the mind-gut-skin axis.

With many of the underlying nuances and mechanisms yet to be elucidated, significant work is still ongoing to discover how the skin microbiome contributes to healthy or diseased skin. In this blog, we discuss some of the findings to date.