Black Skin Science Podcast

Chemical exfoliation for Black and Brown skin is not the same question as chemical exfoliation in general. The same acid at the same percentage can give someone a visible glow and give someone with melanin-rich skin a dark mark that outlasts the problem they were treating. In this episode, we break down why. We get into the three acid families, AHAs including glycolic, lactic, and mandelic acid, B...

Glass skin is not a ten-step routine. It's a hydration problem, specifically whether your skin is holding water and stopping it from escaping through the barrier. In this episode we build the actual routine for getting there. We get into the two real reasons skin looks dull, rough, or oily and dehydrated at the same time, and why pore size is real but isn't actually the obstacle people thi...

Two ingredients every good cleanser should have. Four in every good moisturiser. Two in every serum or toner. And five you need to learn to spot and walk away from. Learn these and you develop a sixth sense for a good skincare product. In this episode we teach you to read the back of any bottle like a formulator. We get into pore cloggers, stripping cleansers, and fungal acne feeders. We break dow...

If your skincare routine has more than five products and your skin still is not where you want it, the problem may not be the products. It may be the architecture. Most people of colour were sold a stack of treatments to fix problems a properly built system would have prevented. In this episode we build the actual structure of a skincare routine for Black and Brown skin from the ground up. Every p...

Most people choose sunscreen by one number: SPF. But SPF is essentially a sunburn stopwatch — it measures how long until your skin shows a visible reaction to UV, and that test was calibrated around a signal that is much quieter on darker skin. So the biggest number on the bottle tells you almost nothing about the damage that actually matters for melanin-rich skin. In this episode we read the back...

Is it even acne? If your routine has not worked in six months, there are only two possibilities. Either it is not acne. Or you are treating the wrong type of acne. Rosacea, fungal acne, closed comedones, and perioral dermatitis all look like acne on darker skin. Every month spent treating the wrong condition means more irritation, more inflammation, and more post-inflammatory hyperpigmentation. To...

If your skincare routine has stopped working — products stinging, skin getting oilier, dark spots returning despite treatment — the problem is almost certainly not the products. It is the barrier those products are supposed to work on. This episode covers the skin barrier: what it actually is, what damages it specifically in Black and brown skin, and the reset protocol that lets it recover. 🔬 Wha...

Most hyperpigmentation guides were built on research that didn't center Black and Brown skin. The ingredient that works best for your dark spots depends partly on your ethnicity — and most skincare content never tells you that. In this episode we go through the evidence with that filter applied. Which ingredients have strong data for skin like ours. Which ones carry specific risks for darker s...

Hyperpigmentation on Black skin is not random. It follows a predictable three-stage biological chain reaction: Production, Transfer, and Deposition. Most routines fail because they only address one stage, leaving the "warehouse" full of pigment ready to move to the surface. In Part 1 of our hyperpigmentation series, we deconstruct the "Map" of a dark spot and provide the clinic...

In this series, cosmetic chemists translate clinical research into dermatology insights and routines that actually work for Black and brown skin. We're moving past marketing trends to focus on the physiology of your skin: how it's built, how it behaves, and what it needs to thrive. WHAT YOU'LL LEARN THIS SEASON: — Mastering the ultimate hyperpigmentation routine and the clinical logic...