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SUMMARY POINTS
What’s Important?
The Fitzpatrick Skin Typing System was never intended to be used to make skincare recommendations.
The Baumann Skin Typing System was designed as a scientific way to prescribe facial skincare routines.
There are four barriers to skin health: dehydration, inflammation, dyspigmentation, and aging.
The goal of any skincare routine is to eliminate the barriers to skin health.
Using a standardized skin typing taxonomy improves communication and aids research efforts.
What’s New?
Combination skin is not a true skin type.
The definition of oily skin is skin with an adequate or excessive amount of sebum production.
An oilier skin type is healthier than a dry skin type.
The definition of pigmented skin is not based on ethnicity or overall skin color; rather, it is based on unevenness of skin tone with pigmented skin being uneven and nonpigmented skin being even skin toned.
Skin type changes over time.
Oily, resistant, nonpigmented, tight skin (Skin Type 10) is the healthiest skin type and can be considered “the normal skin type.”
What’s Coming?
Cosmeceutical research trials will begin to enroll subjects by Baumann Skin Type to improve standardization of results.
Long-term outcome research on skincare routines and skin type will be conducted.
Genetic studies on the Baumann Skin Types and their responses to various skincare routines are planned.
The effects of the microbiome on the 16 Baumann Skin Types will be studied.
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A standardized, scientifically validated approach to diagnose skin type is important to ensure that skin type is correctly identified in all genders, ages, and ethnicities. Diagnosing skin type properly is a necessary step to recommending the best skincare routine to protect and improve skin health. Assigning patients to a skin type phenotype and tracking skin type improvement is beneficial because it helps the medical provider choose which skincare products to retail to match their patients’ demographics and skin types (see Chapter 33, Choosing Skincare Products), prepare skincare advice and regimens ahead of time (see Chapter 35, Skincare Regimen Design), track results more effectively, communicate clearly with colleagues using the same nomenclature, and predict inventory needs by skin type prevalence in the medical practice.
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SKIN TYPING SYSTEMS USED IN DERMATOLOGY
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Skin typing classification systems are used to personalize and customize skincare routines. For skincare routines to precisely target the underlying barriers to skin health, the entire skincare routine, not just the individual products, should be tested on the various skin types in a controlled manner. Each product affects the efficacy of the entire regimen (see Chapter 35) and this can vary by skin type. If cosmetic chemists, cosmetic companies, dermatologists, medical providers, aestheticians, and cosmetics salespeople are not using the same nomenclature, it is impossible to standardize skincare using a scientific approach. In addition, they must all be trained to use the nomenclature properly. A good example is sensitive skin. The meaning of the expression “sensitive ...