An article I’ve been itching to write for months went live on Vanity Fair today: Let Your Lover Touch Your Face. I’ve excerpted it below, but you can click over to vanityfair.com to read it in full!
Anu, a 23-year-old student in Arizona, shies away from kisses on the cheek.
“When I hug my partner, I angle my face away so it doesn’t touch his,” says Aileen, a 36-year-old trust officer in Minnesota.
Marylou, a 25-year-old psychologist in Belgium, stops her boyfriend from brushing the hair from her forehead, or holding her chin in his hands when they kiss. “I would love to be okay with it,” she says. “It would probably make me happier and less tense if I allowed him to touch my face all over.” But still, she doesn’t. “I’m afraid he’ll make me break out.”
For decades, this has been beauty rule number one: Don’t touch your skin. Don’t let anyone else touch your skin. It spreads bacteria and causes acne. It’s touted by doctors and dermatologists, enforced by parents and partners. The problem? Besides the fact that generations of overstressed beauty enthusiasts now flinch at the touch of their lover for fear of getting a pimple, emerging science proves the old school rule half-wrong.
Touch does spread bacteria…but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Bacteria, as it turns out, is the foundation of healthy skin.
Presently, your skin is home to more bacteria than a Penn Station toilet seat—as it should be. These microorganisms belong to your skin’s microbiome, the symbiotic collection of one trillion bacteria, viruses, fungi, yeasts, mites, and more living in and on your dermal layer. Like its more popular counterpart, the gut microbiome, the skin microbiome quite literally keeps you alive. It acts as the immune system’s first line of defense and mitigates allergic reaction, infection, and inflammation.
From a skin-care perspective, bacteria only get better. Specific strains produce ceramides and peptides—ingredients you probably recognize from the back label of your beauty products. Some feed off of dead skin cells, like DIY exfoliants; others feed off sebum, balancing oil levels. Still others produce anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, and antimicrobial compounds, says Elsa Jungman, Ph.D., a skin pharmacologist and microbiome specialist who has worked with L’Oréal Paris. A lack of microbial diversity—that is, not having enough bacteria—has recently been linked to acne, rosacea, eczema, psoriasis, and other skin issues. Really, you could call microbes the original “miracle ingredients.”
As for how to get your hands—er, face—on these skin-saving little buggers? Touch.
Infants gather their initial batch of microorganisms from the birth canal, and “young children continue amassing microbiota in every contact with family members, getting licked by dogs, and sharing toys with friends,” writes James Hamblin, M.D., in Clean: The New Science of Skin. Although the microbiome becomes more resistant to change with age, social interactions continue to influence your skin for the rest of your life: Those who grow up with siblings are less susceptible to eczema later on. People who live with pets or roommates have stronger microbiomes. Hugs and handshakes have been found to transfer microorganisms from person to person—a fact not entirely surprising to those who have elbow-bumped throughout this pandemic.
“Have sex, and you and your partner will perforce exchange a lot of microbes and other organic material,” writes Bill Bryson in The Body: A Guide for Occupants. “Passionate kissing alone, according to one study, results in the transfer of up to one billion bacteria from one mouth to another.” Science shows the mouth microbiome influences the gut microbiome, which then influences the skin microbiome, in a ménage à trois of beneficial bacteria. (Things like spending time in nature and eating fresh fruits and vegetables, though less fun, diversify your microbial count, too.)
Alas, due to the increased isolation, industrialization, and sterilization of modern lifestyles—to say nothing of two understandably germaphobic years—today’s skin microbiomes are likely the least diverse in history. “Some chronic conditions seem to be fueled by the fact that so many of us are now not being exposed enough to the world,” Dr. Hamblin notes in Clean—including those, like dermatitis, affecting skin. “The basic idea is that as our immune systems encounter fewer benign triggers to teach them how to function, they are attacking our bodies more often than they did in the past.”
Could connection—collectivism, community, and, yes, letting your girlfriend touch your face—be part of the solution?
“Humans are wired for touch,” explains Denise Hinds-Zaami, Ph.D., a psychologist and board member of the New York Association of Black Psychologists. By way of example, she points to early research on orphaned infants, which showed that without adequate hands-on attention, the children “could not thrive at all, and even started to die,” she says.
Touch is a biological need, and the brain and body find all sorts of ways to signal the importance of skin-to-skin contact (perhaps, from an evolutionary standpoint, precisely to build up the biome). When your lover’s fingers brush across your face, or the skin of your arm grazes theirs, the body releases oxytocin—the same chemical released during orgasm—which then stimulates dopamine production. Put simply: It feels good.
Conversely, touch starvation “can cause you to be depressed,” Dr. Hinds-Zaami says. “You can feel sad and lonely. You can become anxious.” This leads to an increase in cortisol, the stress hormone, which sets off a cascade of physical reactions. “Your heart rate and blood pressure go up. It can have adverse effects on your immune system, so you’ll be more likely to contract illness and infections.” The lack of stimulation can also interfere with digestion and sleep, she adds—all of which can result in stressed, sensitized skin.
You may recognize this set of symptoms as “skin hunger,” a term popularized in the early months of the pandemic, when survival was synonymous with solitude and Covid-conscious citizens weren’t getting “as much touch as they were used to, or any at all,” Dr. Hinds-Zaami says.
Around this time, skin-care enthusiasts, by way of necessity or intuition, began to embrace an underappreciated facial massage tool: their very own fingers.
Aestheticians dropped their jade rollers and began filming hands-on tutorials instead. Influencers opted out of the latest microcurrent devices and went low-tech. Even Rio Viera-Newton, a professional product obsessive, endorsed the accessible technique by proclaiming that “hands work just as well” as traditional tools in her March 2021 book Let’s Face It.
The trend is a win-win, inside and out. “Self-touch, and self-massage especially, can help [manage the psychological effects of touch starvation] quite a bit,” Dr. Hinds-Zaami explains—and dermatologists confirm that facial massage directly contributes to clearer, calmer, and stronger skin, too.
It all starts with the mechanoreceptors in the dermis. Triggered by the pressure of massage, they “increase the expression of pro-collagen and decrease the enzymes that break down collagen,” says Rachel Nazarian, M.D., a dermatologist in New York City who works with sun-care brand Heliocare. (In layman’s terms: Expect more resilient, more elastic skin.) By stimulating blood circulation, massage manages to ferry more oxygen and nutrients to the target area, which “triggers anti-aging pathways,” she adds. That means more efficient processing at the cellular level.
Lymphatic drainage is another famous upside of facial massage. The lymphatic system, as Dr. Nazarian explains it, is the body’s waste management center. While blood vessels deliver the aforementioned oxygen and nutrients, lymphatic vessels “take away cells’ waste products, clean the tissue, and fight against infection.”
Unlike the circulatory system, which is propelled by the heart, the lymphatic system doesn’t have its own pumping mechanism, so it tends toward sluggishness. “You have a ton of lymph nodes in the head and neck—behind the ears, around the jaw and cheek, and by the throat,” says Lisa Levitt Gainsley, a certified lymphedema therapist. “If your lymph system is congested, it will be reflected in your skin.” This could manifest as puffy eyes, fine lines, loss of firmness and luster, even zits. Luckily, stimulating lymphatic flow via hands-on massage—she offers tutorials in The Book of Lymph as well as on Instagram—“helps regenerate cells and leads to a healthy glow,” says Levitt Gainsley, who sees immediate and long-term effects, particularly with consistent practice.
“Cheeks look a little bit more on point, eyes look a little bit brighter and clearer, the brow gets a little bit of a lift,” adds Dr. Nazarian, who prefers to use gua sha stone with facial oil. “Those benefits you’ll see in minutes.”
The main benefit of facial massage—performed with hands or a sculpting tool, on yourself or a loved one—remains the most coveted of all: stress relief.
“In dermatology, we see stress as the number one reason for skin reactions today,” says Dr. Jungman. Specifically, it’s chronic stress—the ongoing, unrelenting variety—that produces excess cortisol. This can trigger inflammatory conditions including eczema, rosacea, and psoriasis, along with run-of-the-mill breakouts. (Anxiety acne, anyone?) It dysregulates oil production, decreases moisture levels, disrupts the microbiome, and weakens the skin’s ability to self-heal. A compromised barrier brings an uptick in sensitivity and makes skin more susceptible to pollution and sun damage.
While modern living offers endless pathways to elevated cortisol, ironically, for many, skin-care culture itself is a significant source of anxiety.
“I was always told that my fingers can cause breakouts, which can lead to acne, which can lead to permanent scarring,” says Devika C. Dandona, a 40-year-old investor and blogger from Texas. “But what about the emotional scarring this entire line of thought left in my mind?”
All too often, beauty behaviors intended to decrease symptoms—resisting the evolutionary urge to touch and be touched, for example, or trying to disappear your pores, or attempting to emulate the glassy sheen of a freshly Windexed window—can counterintuitively increase stress and thus give rise to “stress skin.”
In that sense, massage kills two stressors with one stone. Daily or weekly practice can help reprogram the (false) belief that the touch you crave is “bad,” while gentle kneading actively decreases cortisol and boosts immune function and oxytocin levels. It all facilitates physical healing. (In two studies, massage significantly improved redness and scaling in eczema patients.)
Dr. Jungman notes that picking and prodding at “active acne” can be detrimental (and painful—another evolutionary cue). “But I don't see why bacteria from touch would cause acne,” she says. “We know being exposed to diverse ecosystems is beneficial overall.”
Common sense still applies, of course. You should wash your hands with reasonable frequency and follow public health protocols. You should not stick a finger in the wound of a freshly-popped pimple or massage yourself with post-hot-wing hands. We are in the midst of a viral pandemic, so keep it in your pods—don’t say I told you to swap microbes with a stranger. The power of touch applies all over, so while there’s no real need to single out the skin on your face, there’s also no need to panic about occasional contact with your partner’s palm.
So go ahead. Let all current and future lovers touch your face.
I love this! However, I must admit the book linked to Amazon broke my little heart.
Thank you 🙏❤️