The sky over Manhattan this past July was the impossible-seeming color of tarnished silverware—dull and dark and somehow also a little yellow. Even hundreds of miles from Canada, where scores of wildfires burned this past summer, the city’s Air Quality Index soared. Every inhale felt sour. Mayor Zohran Mamdani urged New Yorkers to stay indoors. Governor Kathy Hochul’s office distributed over 100,000 N95-style masks to counties across the state. One expert noted that spending a full day outside in such conditions was comparable to smoking seven to nine cigarettes.
I had always thought that 19th-century novelists’ descriptions of industrial England were figurative; it had never occurred to me that the authors might have been merely looking out their coal-stained windows and committing straight reportage to the page. The leaden clouds, black drizzles, chocolate palls—they were real. Walking down the street, I thought about my lungs. Then, standing at my bathroom mirror that evening, I thought about my face.
The Victorians agonized about soot you could see, but the fine particulate matter drifting through apartment windows was completely invisible. There was nothing to squint at really, no dust to wipe away. But a futile instinct made me want to do something. And so in the days that followed, despite being a person who has historically fallen asleep without washing my face, I armed myself. My medicine cabinet came to resemble a very fussy prepper’s bunker, crowded with stockpiles of clinical-looking bottles and stern little pots. Their bellicose labels promised defense and protection; they spoke of “shields” and “fortification.” Many vowed to repair my skin’s “barrier,” as though selling one last stand against the crumbling boundary between ourselves and someone else’s catastrophe.
“Pollution has been a problem in Asia for a long time,” says Marie Jhin, MD, a dermatologist in Silicon Valley who has been observing the gap between American and Asian skin care approaches for years. China and Korea, she went on, are really at the forefront of the antipollution skin-care industry, which is worth billions. “What makes wildfire smoke and urban pollution different from ordinary grime,” Jhin explained, “is penetration.” Regular dirt is too thick to breach the skin’s outer layers, but the particles produced by combustion are small enough to slip through. “Once inside, they generate free radicals that cause oxidative stress—breaking down collagen and triggering inflammation.”
The ingredients such “antipollution” products typically rely on—ceramides and antioxidants like vitamin C, niacinamide, and ferulic acid—are neither new nor novel. They are the same ones that have been incorporated into mainstream skin care for years, just with a more serious and urgent reframing. But American consumers like me, late arrivers to a problem that much of the world has been living with for ages, are now becoming acquainted with an industry that operates with the logic of a private security firm: expensive, confident, perhaps most useful to those who already can afford to feel relatively safe.
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.”
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.”
I left the spa with a damp, plump face and a horrifying image: When I had sat up after the treatment was over, the white towel where my head had been resting for the previous 60 minutes was stained with a tawny skull-shaped corona.
My face had likely never been cleaner than when I walked out of the treatment room, but as I sat on the subway afterward, I imagined my pores becoming more and more contaminated with each passing stop. I got home and arranged the suite of new glass vessels along the bathroom sink: a stout jar of amber-colored cleansing balm; a heavy bottle of exfoliating toner; two slimmer, lighter bottles of antioxidant-rich serums; and a pot of butter-like night cream. I was convinced less of the efficacy of their various lovely sounding ingredients—cranberry extract, birch water, meadowfoam seed oil—than of their promise to make a tedious act of basic hygiene feel like an alluring activity. I was never going to be someone who booked a monthly facial, but at least I could be someone who reliably washes her face each night. Temperatures rise; ancient, old-growth forests burn. No serum will clean up the poor choices of entire nations, but when the crud comes off my face at night, it would be nice not to see in it a memento mori.
.jpg)
.jpg)
