For a long time, the beauty industry was all about the surface. It was a neat equation, tied into an intuitive bow. If the aim is smoother, glowier skin, naturally the method is to apply products onto its surface. In recent years, however, that focus has turned inward. No longer is beauty just about the way our faces and our bodies present to the world, but our bodies’ internal machinations, too.
Now, beauty brands shill skin and hair health supplements alongside topical skincare. Probiotics are sold as much for their glow-inducing potential as for their ability to balance gut health. Ingestible collagen has managed to shapeshift into a dizzying number of forms.
Beauty and the body have become inextricably linked in the minds of the modern consumer. Puffiness and breakouts? That’s your high cortisol. Dull skin? Time for a microbiome intervention, stat. “Consumers are increasingly asking not only, ‘How do I reduce this redness, breakout or wrinkle?’ but ‘Why is my skin behaving this way?’” says Katy Bacon, senior director of global education at science-backed skincare brand Murad. The growing interest in “inflammageing” – how chronic, low-grade inflammation can accelerate the skin’s ageing process – reflects this broader shift, Bacon says. “[It’s] moving beyond individual symptoms to understand the interconnected processes that may contribute to multiple skin concerns at once.”
What Is Inflammaging?
Inflammageing is not actually a beauty concept. Italian gerontologist Claudio Franceschi coined the term at the turn of the millennium to describe how age and the inflammation that comes with it can affect our cells. Beauty has since borrowed the term, translating a complex area of ageing biology into a much more marketable question: what is inflammation doing to our faces?
First, a disclaimer: despite its reputation, inflammation isn’t inherently bad. When our bodies are under attack in some form – through injury, stress or one too many martinis – it’s a defence mechanism that allows our immune systems to mobilise and protect us by promoting repair and healing. The problem comes when that response doesn’t switch off. As we age, researchers believe the body can enter a state of more persistent inflammation, which may contribute not just to wrinkles and loss of elasticity, but to a broader decline in health. It’s important to remember that the effects of this kind of chronic inflammation don’t necessarily present as red or inflamed skin. It can look like dullness, fine lines and generally diminished skin health.
“Inflammation is an event. Inflammageing is a debt”
– Dr Prasanthi Purusothaman
As we age, damaged or “senescent” cells can linger rather than being cleared efficiently by the immune system, explains Dr Prasanthi Purusothaman, a GP, cosmetic doctor and founder of L’Orient, a skincare brand targeted towards melanin-rich skin. Those cells release inflammatory signals, which can further impair the body’s ability to clear them, creating a feedback loop. She describes the distinction simply: “Inflammation is an event. Inflammageing is a debt.”
What keeps this inflammatory response switched on?
Ageing itself – the one guarantee in life – is part of the equation. Other contributors aren’t mandatory but we seem to run around our busy modern lives as if they were. Stress, overwork, pollutants and poor eating habits are key aggressors.
For women, the picture becomes murkier because of the way our hormones intersect with lifestyle factors, time and life stages. Immune systems are sensitive to progesterone and oestrogen, and the surges and lulls in amounts over the years dramatically influence our bodily responses. “Oestrogen has effects throughout the body, including on the immune system and inflammatory pathways,” says Dr Leanne Girgis, a GP and founder of ingestible beauty brand Innour.
It can also affect the skin’s collagen, hydration, elasticity and barrier function. Menopause – historically under-researched and bafflingly heterogeneous in its symptoms – comes with “a number of biological and metabolic changes, and inflammation is one part of that much bigger picture,” Girgis says.
How do we slow down the signs of inflammageing?
It’s a question that the beauty industry is racing to answer. In recent months, the beauty shelves have been heaving with promises to cool, to calm, to soothe. (Do they work on our brains as well?) Ingredients such as ectoin, centella asiatica, azelaic acid and ceramides are being touted as cure-alls for inflammation. While new products said to tackle the issue are appearing at every price point. Culinary ingredients are featuring, too. Australian label Drops of Gold is offering grass-fed ghee as an anti-inflammatory product. While turmeric, the South Asian ingredient with a long heritage, has been co-opted by Western skincare brands touting its calming properties. And anti-inflammation travel retreats are cropping up everywhere, from the serene hills around Rome to the Mayrlife resort in Austria’s Alps.
One thing that “calming” products can do is fight bog-standard skin inflammation and redness. Whether that’s caused by a complex intersection of age and inflammation, or because you are prone to rosacea. But sometimes the culprit can be an ironic one. In May, The Guardian reported that more and more women are suffering from perioral dermatitis. Partly because of using too many active ingredients in their skincare routines. Too much of a good thing – that old dogma touted by the wise, and listened to by almost no-one.
But perhaps we’d do better to. Purusothaman says that her patients’ routines are often doing too much rather than too little. Over-exfoliation and layering multiple active ingredients night after night can provoke the skin barrier. Kickstarting an inflammatory response that then leaves you flailing around for another product to calm it. It’s part of a wider culture of optimisation, which has infected modern beauty shelves as much as it has modern work culture. Meaningful skin outcomes take months or years, she explains. While social media rewards results that can be photographed on day three.
Can skincare actually help?
Skincare can, however, help reduce the signs of deeper inflammation within the body, Bacon explains. It can help to create a “healthier environment at the skin’s surface by reducing daily environmental stress, maintaining hydration and supporting the skin barrier and microbiome”. But according to Purusothaman, the interventions with the strongest evidence are “a little boring”: sunscreen, sleep and diet. “None of it is purchasable in a satisfying way. So none of it trends.”
And there is a danger in turning inflammageing into yet another beauty problem to be solved. “The wellness industry can sometimes oversimplify this and make it sound as though inflammation is the single cause of ageing – and it isn’t,” Girgis says. “Skin ageing is multifactorial.”
“The wellness industry can sometimes … make it sound as though inflammation is the single cause of ageing – and it isn’t”
– Dr Leanne Girgis
And there’s the crux of it: ageing can’t be stopped, no matter how hard we might try. Inflammation is part of the picture, and the goal isn’t to eliminate or actively suppress responses to stress or poor lifestyle choices. Sometimes, your skin looking sallower or your eyes looking a little less bright is simply your body telling you something. Our bodies, after all, have been evolving ways of ringing internal alarm bells over millennia. As Girgis puts it: “The body isn’t something we want to switch off.”
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