His & Hers Skin Products—Is There A Meaningful Difference?

It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!

Have a question or a request? We love to hear from you!

In cases where we’ve already covered something, we might link to what we wrote before, but will always be happy to revisit any of our topics again in the future too—there’s always more to say!

As ever: if the question/request can be answered briefly, we’ll do it here in our Q&A Thursday edition. If not, we’ll make a main feature of it shortly afterwards!

So, no question/request too big or small 😎

❝You said that Minoxidl doesn’t really matter if it says for men or woman and it’s the same, what about skin products?❞

A good question with an interesting answer!

So, first of all, to recap for any who might need catching up: minoxidil is a hair loss remedy, marketed as being against “female pattern hair loss” or “male pattern hair less”, but they’re functionally the same thing (the visual pattern can vary according to hormones, but the actual biological process is the same in either case), and the chemical is literally exactly the same. There is no difference, beyond the words and perhaps colors on the packaging.

We wrote about that, here: What’s The Difference Between Minoxidil For Men vs For Women?

So, what about skin?

The basic processes of skin maintenance are more or less the same regardless of sex, but there are some hormone-mediated differences, and this is why, as a general rule of thumb, men and women often have different skin textures, and different skin behaviors (e.g. different sweat patterns, different inclinations to greasiness or dryness, etc).

And yes, this is definitely about hormones rather than genes or anything else, because if we change the hormones, then the skin changes accordingly.

Humans taking HRT are a great example of this, but difficult to do RCTs due to the ethics of withholding HRT from someone who needs it (or, for that matter, castrating male participants), so here’s a study in mice, that found:

❝Results from quantitative analyses of clonal dynamics support a two-compartment model of epidermal homeostasis, whereby basal cells are organized in a stem cell–transit-amplifying cell hierarchy. Critical to these conclusions was the discovery of sexual dimorphism in epidermal fate, with female mice showing a highly synchronized pattern of cell division, differentiation and delamination that contributes to accelerated wound healing. Single-cell RNA sequencing, transcriptional profiling and clonal analyses of castrated mice revealed that male sex hormones promote stem cell differentiation and delamination.❞

In other words, they looked at the behavior of skin on a cellular level, and found that removing sex hormones resulted in a different skin cell behavior, and adding exogenous sex hormones brought about the skin cell behavior we’d associate with those sex hormones based on the previous research.

You can find the paper in full, here: Sexual dimorphism in epidermal stem cell dynamics

This is also, of course, why we see such things as: Signs Of Low Estrogen In Women: What Your Skin, Hair, & Nails Are Trying To Tell You

And skin products?

Honestly, it depends on what they are; sometimes they’ll be more appropriate for men or woman on the whole, sometimes not.

For example, petroleum jelly (like Vaseline) is going to be an occlusive barrier cream no matter whose skin you put it on, and will stop transdermal water loss in both case.

On the other hand, some skin products will do better than others at treating dry skin, or oily skin, or sensitive skin, or inflamed skin, or various other circumstantial conditions that are affected by the the underlying hormones, but it’s not really about a “this is for women” or “this is for men”, so much as “this is for people with thin skin”, “this is for people with acne”, etc, and it’s incidental (not coincidental, but incidental) that those will, in turn, tend to be associated with certain sex hormones.

See for example: If You’re Getting Acne Now & Didn’t Before, This Is Why

Sometimes that crossover will allow for quite obviously “marketable to people of a certain sex” things, like How to Use Topical Estrogen Cream For Aging Skin

Other skin products that we don’t tend to think of as skin products, like deodorant, can actually have differences that aren’t do with sex at all, really, for example:

• men’s deodorants tend to be designed for people with underarm hair (so that the active ingredient won’t get clogged in the hairs)
• women’s deodorants tend to be designed for people without underarm hair (so that it makes a nice surface layer that will reduce chafing)

Now, having underarm hair or not is heavily correlated with sex especially in places like N. America, but at the end of the day it’s utterly a personal choice and not actually any kind of naturally-occurring difference.

You can learn more about this, here: Simply The Pits: These Underarm Myths!

Want to learn more?

For a much more in-depth overview of skin types than we have room for here, check out this book that we reviewed:

Skincare – by Caroline Hirons

Take care!