This Skin Swab Tells You If Your Tweakments Worked

How can you know the state of health of your skin – and whether a new skincare regime or tweakment has improved it – apart from checking in the mirror? I’m intrigued by a new – and simple – skin analysis method that analyses the health and energy levels of your skin from a straightforward skin swab.

Here’s everything you need to know…

How can you traditionally elevate the success of a treatment?

When I’m starting on a course of treatment – whether that’s skincare or tweakments – one of the key things I’m concerned with is finding a way to evaluate the effectiveness of the treatment. There’s a few ways you can traditionally do that…

The mirror 

Can I see a change in the mirror? If so, great, but often, I can’t really tell what’s different, especially if the changes have taken place over a few months.

Before-and-after photos

Before and after photos, can go the next step further, yes – especially if these are carefully done using the exact same lighting and angles. In-depth imaging with a device like Visia or Aura are even better. These can show the extent of sun damage, fine lines, skin redness and all that, so are very useful for tracking changes and improvements in skin quality and texture. If they’re 3-D images, all the better to see any change in facial volume or, say a tighter jawline.

What’s the buzz about the skin swab method?

Now there’s a new method that clinics can use, to analyse the damage to the mitochondria in the skin. (The mitochondria, as I’m sure you know, are the ‘batteries’ of the cell, and they are a key biomarker for skin health).

“As we get older, the mitochondria, the factories of energy in our cells, wear out,” explains Professor Mark Birch-Machin, who is Professor of Molecular Dermatology and Associate Dean at Newcastle University and, as founder of Skin Life Analytics, the brains behind the swab.

“My work over the last 30 years has been looking at the effect of stressors on skin and particularly skin ageing,” continues Professor Birch-Machin. “Healthy mitochondria lead to vibrant skin. Worn-out mitochondria lead to tired-looking skin So therefore, if we want to have bio-energetic skin, we want to look after our mitochondria.”

If you remember seeing the TV series programme that sent people on holiday and measured their ‘sunburt DNA’ to show the damage that roasting on a beach does to the skin, that was Prof Birch-Machin’s work. So was the widely publicised study showing that eating three tablespoons of concentrated tomato paste a day helped strengthen the skin against UV damage.

How do you make invisible damage visible?

“What we’re doing with Skin Life analytics, is we’re really looking at this hidden information at a molecular level, making that invisible damage visible,” he says.

Once you know your baseline levels, you could try a new skincare regime, improve your lifestyle choices, or try a skin-reviving tweakment then re-swab in 12 week and see what changes show up.

I’m familiar with this test because a long time ago, I did a year-long study with the Prof’s department with an early version of this technology, taking swabs from my skin and adopting different lifestyle behaviours to see how that impacted my skin. Here’s the article I wrote about this which showed very clearly that things like eating lots of vegetables was really good for my skin, having a lot of stress and no sleep was terrible.

The final word

The new test retails at £149.99, although all the forward-thinking clinics that have trialled it so far have incorporated it as part of a package for their clients, over three to six months typically for ongoing testing, says Prof Birch-Machin.

“The magic is that it tells you whether or not the intervention or change in your lifestyle has worked and made your skin healthier,” he continues. “It isn’t down to subjective feelings. You can’t argue with the DNA, the DNA doesn’t lie, and then you know if what you have tried has worked. Even if the treatment hasn’t worked as well as you hoped, you can pivot to another intervention, so it really empowers people to make the difference.”

Sound intriguing? You can find out more about it, at skinlifeanalytics.com. Would you put it to the test?