Your Skin Is Not a Surface. It’s an Ecosystem.
Most skincare routines are built around a simplistic idea: strip the skin, then replace what was removed with a synthetic product. It sounds logical. The science of the skin microbiome suggests it is one of the most damaging things we can do for long-term skin health.
This is the central argument of Episode 01 of Skin as it should be, the Esse podcast series. In the opening episode, host Geoff Paton speaks with Esse’s late founder and master chemist Trevor Steyn about how microbiome research transformed the way he thought about skin, and how the formulations he built for Esse were a direct response to what that science revealed.
What lives on your skin
The Human Microbiome Project, which began publishing results around 2010, applied DNA sequencing technology to map the full microbial population living in and on the human body. What was found on the skin was a rich, species-specific ecology. These bacteria co-evolved alongside human skin, and many exist nowhere else on earth.
They are not incidental. They regulate the skin barrier, manage immune signalling, and play a direct role in controlling inflammation. A diverse, balanced microbiome is one of the primary mechanisms by which healthy skin stays healthy.
What modern routines do to it
The average Western skin has lost an estimated 70% of its microbial diversity compared to populations living traditional lifestyles. The most significant driver of that loss is conventional skincare: foaming cleansers that strip natural oils, astringent toners, and petrochemical emollients disrupt skin’s ecosystem and interfere with the processes that keep it healthy.
This approach rarely causes visible damage in the short term. Skin is resilient enough to absorb the disruption. Over time, the cumulative reduction in microbial diversity shows up as increased sensitivity, barrier dysfunction, and a greater susceptibility to conditions like acne and atopic dermatitis. These conditions are effectively absent in hunter-gatherer communities whose skin has not been subject to this routine.
What it takes to restore it
The answer is not simply switching to gentler products. Restoring a depleted microbiome requires actively restoring the conditions that support skin’s microbial
partners, the ones it co-evolved with and depends on for healthy function. Probiotic skincare can add live microbes that aid in this process. Certain probiotic species, known as “keystone species”, can shift the conditions on skin to favour beneficial partners. Reintroduce them, and broader diversity begins to rebuild beneath them relatively quickly.
The challenge is delivery. Keeping live bacteria stable and viable inside a topical product is a significant technological problem, one that took Esse years of research and development to solve. Esse was the first to crack it, delivering live bacteria in a skincare product in February 2015.
That work is at the core of the Esse Probiotic Serum. It contains live Lactobacillus and Bacillus coagulans. Not extracts or fermentation byproducts, but viable, living organisms that can colonise the skin and act as those keystone species, creating the conditions for broader microbial diversity to re-establish.
The better-ageing connection
A compromised microbiome does not just affect how skin looks today. Microbiome imbalance is one of the upstream drivers of accelerated skin ageing. It feeds chronic low-level inflammation, weakens the barrier, and reduces the skin’s capacity for self-regulation. Restoring microbial diversity addresses all three.
Skin that maintains a healthy, diverse microbiome is more resilient, more even, and better equipped to manage the environmental pressures that accumulate over time. That is the foundation of Esse’s better-ageing philosophy and the science that Trevor Steyn spent his career building products around.
Episode 01 of Skin as it should be is the full conversation. It covers the science of the skin microbiome, what conventional skincare does to it, and what genuine long-term skin health looks like in practice.