Sweet Potatoes Are Skincare

A treat for your taste buds and skin barrier both.

Hello, dewy dust bunnies! Things got a little heavy on Tuesday, eh? Let’s lighten the mood with an ode to the season’s skin-friendliest food: the sweet potato.

I first started pondering the skin-sweet potato connection while listening to an old episode of The Cut’s podcast, in which Stella Bugbee — then editor-in-chief of The Cut, now Styles editor at The New York Times — says that she eats a sweet potato for breakfast every single morning. Her comment was unrelated to skincare, but since my brain is hardwired to turn every conversation into a skincare conversation (see: my experiments with meditation as skincare, breathing as skincare, and even orgasm as skincare), I couldn’t keep my skin-obsessed synapses from firing. Sweet potatoes are orange. Orange things — turmeric, carrots, cantaloupe — are rich in beta carotene. Beta carotene is a vitamin A precursor. Vitamin A is good for your skin. Therefore, sweet potatoes are good for your skin?!

I reached out to Bugbee to ask if she noticed any beauty benefits from her high beta carotene breakfasts. “I just feel like my whole body is thanking me when I eat a sweet potato,” she tells me over email. “But I don’t eat them for the skin benefits.”

Undeterred, I enlisted a naturopath and a dermatologist. Both confirmed that my reasoning, though reductive, was relatively sound. “High beta carotene content is essentially a retinol ‘precursor,’” says Dr. Nadia Musavvir, a naturopathic doctor and nutrition expert. “When you consume beta carotene, it gets converted in the body to active vitamin A, or retinol.” Consider it a very mild, non-irritating version of the industry’s favorite active. “The antioxidant helps neutralize any free radical damage,” Dr. Musavvir explains, and supports the creation of healthy skin cells. “High beta carotene diets have even been shown to protect against photodamage and skin cancer.”

(Sidebar: Wondering why topical retinol is so irritating to the skin and food-based retinol is not? It’s because the body converts retinol into retinoic acid. When you apply topical retinol, that chemical process occurs directly on your face; causing what’s known as the “retinoid uglies” [AKA, the dermatological mass delusion that hurting your skin = helping your skin]. When you consume ingestible retinol, that ​chemical process occurs within the digestive system — so the skin barrier remains unbothered and retinol’s benefits are distributed throughout the body, rather than harshly concentrated on the surface of your skin. This is precisely why I love the concept of eating your skincare! Your skin gets the nutrients it needs to fuel its inherent functions right where those inherent functions start — the innermost layers of the skin, where new skin cells are produced daily using vitamins and minerals obtained from your diet — and your skin barrier gets to chill. Besides, skin-level symptoms are often signs of imbalance elsewhere in the body, so when you treat your entire being to essential nutrients like vitamin A, the benefits eventually flow to your face.)

Save your skin barrier! Eat a sweet potato!

“Sweet potatoes are also packed with antioxidant vitamin C, which is a key player in the production of collagen,” adds Dr. Aanand Geria, a board-certified dermatologist with Geria Dermatology. And while people love to celebrate collagen’s capacity to promote plump-/juicy-/young-looking skin, the protein serves more important purposes: Collagen is a protector and a healer. It boosts your skin’s resilience and comes to the rescue when it’s damaged. It needs vitamin C in order to perform those functions. Vitamin C is also known for “brightening” and balancing skin tone, but again, those claims are all aesthetic and there are far more fascinating things happening beneath the surface. Like, that brightening effect? It’s due to the fact that vitamin C supports the skin’s healing process by regulating the amount of melanin it produces, thereby “lifting” hyperpigmentation. (As I’ve said before, hyperpigmentation is a sign of past or in-progress healing.)

More fantastic news for your face: Dr. Geria says this seasonal side dish is “very fibrous.” Fiber is a prebiotic, meaning it feeds the beneficial bacteria of your digestive microbiome, meaning it influences the beneficial bacteria of your dermal microbiome. The result: Less reactive, more self-sufficient skin.

“In Traditional Chinese Medicine, sweet potato builds Qi or vital energy and promotes yin or fluid, moving energy of the kidneys, which in turn helps combat dryness and inflammation,” adds Dr. Musavvir — so theoretically, sweet potatoes could enhance hydration. (This isn’t as traceable as the beta carotene thing, but it’s still nice to think about.)

Sweet potatoes even literally make you glow… although that’s more of a “side effect” than a “benefit”. Dr. Geria notes that eating too many sweet potatoes can result in carotenoderma, or “the discoloration of the skin that can happen if there is excessive consumption of foods rich in beta carotene. This is most easily seen on the palms and soles.” It’s only temporary. Cut back on the sweet potatoes (or carrots, or turmeric, or cantaloupe) and your coloring will return to normal.

So what constitutes the perfect amount of sweet potatoes? Enough to reap the gentle, retinol-adjacent rewards without looking like a student at my suburban New Jersey high school circa 2007 (orange)? “You would need approximately 30 milligrams per day,” Dr. Musavvir says, or one big potato. Dr. Geria estimates it’ll take three weeks to see the starchy veggie’s effects — so yes, I will be freezing 21 portions of Thanksgiving leftovers and conducting a little experiment.

Anyway! Save your skin barrier. Eat a sweet potato.

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A version of this story originally appeared in The Zoe Report in 2019.