Here’s a classic conundrum for you: you buy a new product, right? You take it home, use it for a couple of days, you love it. The results you are getting from it seem almost magical. You talk it up to all your friends, maybe you even push it into someone’s hands.

You integrate it into your routine. This new product becomes a staple. You start to take it for granted, and then…

Is it just you, or did it stop working? That old concern starts to rear its ugly head yet again. What gives?

Did your old friend the Great New Product quit on you? Or is your skin in open rebellion?

It’s happened to everyone. This experience is just simply not uncommon and it leaves us with real questions about our skin, our health, and about the products we use to keep those factors on track. Our usual response when faced with a predicament like this is to add more, more, more. More product, more scrubbing, more times a day. But as we’ve said so often here: more is so often more of the wrong things. More irritation, more blemishes, more pain and self doubt.

So instead of heaping on, let’s take a second and let Skin Actives founder Dr. Hannak Sivak walk us through some of these concepts.

Beauty Products and Your Skin

Remember back in the days of the iPod™ with the shuffle feature? Even though you had hundreds, maybe thousands of songs loaded onto a single device, you’d hear these weird connections. Like, what are the odds it would play two songs off "Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band" right in a row? Despite what Apple™ was telling us about the efficiency of its randomization mechanics, there had to be a pattern, right? There had to be something else going on.

But here’s the thing: your ability to see patterns everywhere is a direct product of human evolution. So, it seems obvious but maybe you’ve never spent time thinking about it before.

Your prehistoric ancestor’s ability to be a successful predator in a world of dangerous animals was directly related to their ability to observe and interpret the world around them. Consider: you and your prehistoric tribe are walking through tall grass. You see the tips of the grass shudder immediately before a sabre-tooth tiger pounces. You escape, but the next time you see the tall grass shudder in that way, you know to take cover. Those in your tribe who haven’t learned the lesson, who have recognised the pattern, fall prey to predation. Their inability to learn, observe, and connect is removed from the gene pool.

It’s a matter of life and death, literally.

BUT, and here is the kicker: just because the tall grass shudders, it does not necessarily mean that there is a sabre-tooth tiger there, every. Single. Time. Maybe there were some herons that you came upon, your tribe startled them, and now they are flying away for protection. Maybe there are some kids out there playing make-believe. If you take the precautions necessary to avoid predation you are working on what’s called a false positive.

But you don’t always know what’s a false positive and what’s not.

So your brain has made this correlation. You need this correlation to survive.

What does all this mean in terms of skincare?

Well, your brain is always searching for patterns, and guess what? Sometimes it sees patterns that are false positives. They are patterns that aren’t really patterns at all. You see, two variables have to exert cause and effect on one another in order to form a pattern. There has to be a connection. This is causation. Variables that are not not necessarily interconnected but still move at the same time is called correlation. Correlation without causation can lead us to make faulty observations about the world in which we live. It can have us misrepresent reality within the space of our minds.

This is why we have science!

As we have said before: science is not a force. It is not a belief system or a world view. Science is a process. It is a process of observation.

When Skin Actives makes a product, we’re looking at whether the confluence of variables results in causation. If active A is combined with active B, what happens? Now you can get into all sorts of the descriptions of the scientific method and how it works. You probably started learning about it when you were in grade school and high school, but executing it is a very complex discipline. And, as much as we might want all science to be very clear, cut and dry, sometimes science, its interpretation and its conclusions can be subjective. That’s part of the reality we have to live within.

How Long Do Skincare Products Last

So where are we going with all of this?

Well, there is a greater concept at play here, and it’s that you might be witnessing correlation with your skin care products seeming to fail, not necessarily causation. We have to be careful whenever we are making observations about our own body, especially when they are made over time. Simply because there are two variables in play, say, your skin, and your skincare products, does not necessarily mean that the results you are seeing is because of them.

Here’s what our founder, Dr. Hannah Sivak, has to say about the subject:

“I don’t know of any papers that address this issue in skincare. But we know that microbes can adapt to the environment and even mutate, giving us bacteria that become resistant to antibiotics.

I also know that even if products stay the same, the skin doesn’t. You may think that your skin has become ‘resistant’ to an ingredient used to decrease sebum secretion, while what actually happened is that your skin has changed in response to the hormonal cycle.

​​So, yes, a product may become less effective over time. Rather than just changing “because,” think about the changes, what caused them, and identify the culprit/s. 

Even when a product is perfect for you, it can become less than perfect after a while. For example, Skin Actives collagen serum may have everything your skin needs today. But after a couple of months, when all those ‘old needs’ are met, maybe the limiting factor for your skin will change and you will be needing the lipids that are found in the Nourishing Skin Serum (I keep it on my desk at all times!).”

So this is a kind of interesting perspective.

On some level what Hannah is telling us here is that actives are actives. What they do doesn’t change. But your skin does change. Your skin is a living biological system, it’s an organ. The needs of your skin have some basic constants, but they are also in flux depending on what the environment is like and what’s going on around you.

Reasons For Skin Change

There are as many reasons that the behavior of your skin might change as there are things in the world. That’s to say, seemingly infinite. However, there are some broad but consistent categories you might look into as part of your own scientific process before you make any dramatic redirections in your skin care routine.

1. Season - It’s probably no surprise to Skin Actives devotees that the needs of your skin change dramatically by season. For instance, depending on where you live, air is much more dry in the winter, and you may find that your skin needs extra hydration. Meanwhile in the summer, the days are longer and you’re being exposed to more sun and that means that your skin is producing more free radicals. You’ll want to up your antioxidant game in the summer, but your sunscreen step should be year ‘round.

2. Stress - We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: stressors are hard on your body, your health and therefore, your skin health. Stressors come from your external environment to be sure, but they also come from internal sources like when you are having a bad time at work, or you’re burning the candle at both ends for social obligations and not getting enough sleep. Look at stress as a skin concern, and one that you can take steps to lessen.

3. Previous Irritation - In addition to just having your skin responding to a particularly aggressive routine or series of products, it may be that your new skincare gem was never what you thought it was in the first place. As Dr. Sivak says:

“A product may have been bad for you from the start, and your skin may be responding to a constant change in acidity.

Frequent peels will decrease the efficacy of the skin barrier. While the initial peel may have felt “satisfying,” subsequent peels will make the skin feel sensitive simply because the nerves will be more exposed to external irritants.”

4. Genetic Predisposition - Some problems are just beyond the purview of the skin health industry. As much as Skin Actives Scientific and the companies that exist in the same spaces as we do want to help and change lives there are just some problems that need to be addressed by medicine. If you have a skin concern that is defying all your attempts to address it, and it’s still influencing the way you live your life, consider making an appointment with a dermatologist that you trust.