You share 99% of your DNA with chimpanzees and bonobos … what’s the biggest genetic difference between humans and our closest living relatives?
It’s in the genes that control our skin. Humans have weird skin.
We have evolved a set of genes that allow us to produce unique oils in our sebaceous glands … eclectic fatty acids like Sapienic acid and Sebaleic acid that aren’t found anywhere else in the animal kingdom. It is becoming increasingly clear that these oils are highly curated to feed very specific, co-evolved microbes that thrive on human skin.
Why do we use surfactants to wash this oil off every day?
It seems unlikely that humans would have developed a clade of genes to produce large amounts of unique oil on the surface of skin for no reason. Perhaps we should reconsider this practice in light of the fact that more than half of American women now consider themselves to have sensitive skin?