The Suspicious Six: Are these really the worst for your skin?

The short answer: Not for most people but it’s complicated.

The long answer: How much time do you have?

When I was first asked to give my opinion on the ‘suspicious six’ I went straight to the DE website to find out the reasoning for labeling these six as being so evil.

What did I find? Nothing. Not one explanation or scientific reference. What I found was a story. One woman’s story – what in research we would refer to as a n=1 study. Though I do think clinical experience is an extremely valuable part of our scientific knowledge base, this woman is not basing her belief system on many years of clinical experience or any clinical experience in fact. She is not a doctor, a chemist, a physicist or even a pharmacist. She has no education in the basics of skin physiology and pathology. She has never seen patients experiencing severe facial skin diseases like acne conglobata or atopic dermatitis or discoid lupus or acne rosacea or perioral dermatitis. She has never tried to manage these complex skin diseases which often destroy people’s self-confidence and their lives. She has certainly never looked at skin biopsies under a microscope to be able to better understand how a pathology disrupts the structure of the skin.

Yet she has the audacity to make one of the grandest statements I have ever seen in dermatology: ‘We believe that these six ubiquitous ingredients are at the root of almost every skin issue, and when they’re removed entirely from your routine…skin can reset and return to its healthiest, most balanced state.’

Oh wait – this isn’t dermatology – this is Big Business. My mistake.

This makes me angry. Really angry. It puts the blame for ‘almost every skin issue’ on the patient because the underlying idea she is propagating here is that skin disease is due to external factors.

And it’s brilliant marketing: ‘you caused your own skincare problem by using every other brand’s products so – look – I have made a product line without any of these evil ingredients so buy mine and your skin will be perfect! And don’t these bottles look super cute in your bathroom?’ She has honed-in on a USP which has made her company extremely successful and, from a business point of view, that’s brilliant. (DE was sold to Shiseido recently for a whopping $845 million!!) But it is the equivalent of going up to someone with cancer and saying ‘you have caused your cancer by eating foods containing these 6 ingredients so I am going to sell you a diet without these six ingredients and your cancer will be cured!’ What would you say if you were a patient with cancer or a relative of a cancer patient? You would probably be inclined towards a rather angry, violent reaction to this person, right?

You might even go so far as to cut out the six ingredients because it probably won’t hurt you but you wouldn’t stop your chemotherapy or having your cancer surgically removed. Because that would be insane.
When I read the ‘our story’ page from the DE website, it makes me cringe. The grandiose, un-referenced, un-scientific statements fuel the misinformation that is so prevalent within the world of skincare right now.

They lack understanding of even basic skin physiology and pathology. This is skincare marketing at its very best: emotive, with all the buzzwords the millennial skin consumer is looking for, with an amicable ‘I’m your best friend’ personality. It is brilliant business but incredibly misleading for the consumer.