That’s not to say that this new sense of alarm is unwarranted. “Air pollution—specifically nitrogen dioxide and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons—can cause premature skin aging, hyperpigmentation, and can worsen conditions like eczema, rosacea, and acne,” says Melissa K. Levin, MD, a dermatologist and founder of Entière Dermatology in New York City. Or as Jhin put it bluntly: “My firefighter patients have terrible skin.”
My medicine cabinet came to resemble a very fussy prepper’s bunker, crowded with stockpiles of clinical-looking bottles
Raj Fadadu, MD, a dermatologist at UC San Diego who has studied the effects from wildfire smoke in San Francisco from 2018’s California’s Camp Fire, was skeptical that the antipollution-promising vials behind my mirror were offering as much armor as their carefully designed labels indicated. “A lot of the hype is likely speculative without strong clinical evidence,” he counseled. Much of the theoretical logic behind antipollution skin care is probably sound enough, Fadadu continued—many ingredients are marketed as reducing inflammation and decreasing oxidative stress in the skin, which is what air pollution can induce. But the lack of regulation and clinical studies makes their effectiveness difficult to gauge. There is “limited evidence” that topical niacinamide and vitamin C “could help reduce the negative impacts of air pollution on the skin,” as Fadadu put it. But his own recommendations for poor-air-quality days were less glamorous than I was hoping for: Wash your face, try to stay inside, close your windows, wear a mask.
Inspired by acquisition if not action, I vowed to take at least Fadadu’s first piece of advice seriously. And so I booked a facial.
Diana Yerkes, a lead esthetician at Rescue Spa in Manhattan, had been noticing similar concerns to mine all summer. Working a honey-like cleansing balm—from Danucera, a line developed by the spa’s founder—across my forehead, she explained that clients who came in on their regular four-to-six-week schedule were arriving with more congestion than usual, their skin looking, as she put it, “gray.” Yerkes, I was surprised to hear, actually agreed with the simplicity of Fadadu’s recommendations. “At the end of the day, cleansing is your most important step,” she said. Doing it twice, though, she added, was nonnegotiable: The first pass was to remove the obvious filth—the sunscreen, the subway grime, the coffee residue around the mouth—the second pass, ideally with the same non-stripping product, was to obliterate the rest. “Your skin mantle,” Yerkes explained, “is made of oil, and when you apply oil on oil it removes all the residuals more efficiently than when you strip it down with some bubbly situation.” She advised that I relegate my drugstore soap to the shower or, better yet, pawn it off on my husband. Within 28 days, she said, I would notice a difference. “I’m not promising unicorns.”
