Why Do We Have Pores, And Could We Not?

Today’s almonds have been activated by:

⏰ IN A RUSH?

Today’s 30-Second Summary

If you don’t have time to read the whole email today, here are some key takeaways:

• What purpose to dreams serve, according to psychology? There’s not a single unified scientific consensus yet, but there are two or three prevailing views, e.g. randomly generated, a by-product of reorganizing information in the brain, or expressions of subconscious thoughts/feelings.

• Pores get a lot of bad press, but we do need them. Without them, we’d be completely hairless (not the very most terrible fate at this point in our evolution, but still noteworthy), prone to overheating, and, perhaps most importantly, have constantly inflamed, dry, flaking, itchy skin over 100% of our bodies.

  • Check out today’s main feature for more on the science of this, plus what to do if your pores are being a bit more active than you’d like!

• As we age, our collagen levels tend to get depleted more easily. Collagen is important not just for youthful good looks, but also for the health of bones and joints

  • Today’s sponsor NativePath are offering high-quality collagen without additives or harmful impurities

Read on to learn more about these things, or click here to visit our archive

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❓ MAIN FEATURE

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 😎

❝I have a question or a suggestion for coverage in your “Psychology Sunday”. Dreams: their relevance, meanings ( if any) interpretations? I just wondered what the modern psychological opinions are about dreams in general.❞

We’ll indeed do that one of these Psychology Sundays! Thanks for suggesting it.

What we can say in advance is that there’s certainly not a single unified scientific consensus yet, but there are two or three prevailing views definitely worth covering, e.g. randomly generated, a by-product of reorganizing information in the brain, or expressions of subconscious thoughts/feelings.

There are also differences between a top-down/bottom-up approach to understanding dreaming, and efforts to tie those two together.

Watch this space!

❝Do we really need pores, and why are they bigger on the face?❞

Pores secrete sweat or sebum (there are different kinds of pores for each).

If we didn’t have sweat pores, we’d be unable to sweat, which superficially may seem like a bonus, but it’d make us prone to overheating (like dogs, pigs, and other mammals that cannot sweat).

If we didn’t have sebum pores (usually called hair follicles, which are supplied by a sebaceous gland), we’d be completely hairless, and also unable to supply our skin with natural oils that keep it healthy. So we’d have no hair and very unhappy skin.

Which is ironic, because to believe beauty magazines, we must at all costs minimize our pores (and indeed, interventions like botox* can kill them).

*Let’s give that its full name though:

Botulinum Neurotoxin Type A in the Treatment of Facial Seborrhea and Acne: Evidence and a Proposed Mechanism

Suffice it to say, we do not recommend getting injected with neurotoxins unless it is truly necessary to ward off a greater harm.

As for being bigger on the face, they need not be, but sebaceous glands are more active and numerous there, being most active and numerous in the face/forehead—which is why oily skin is more likely to appear there than other parts of the body.

If your facial sebaceous glands are too active for your liking…

…there are ways to reduce that, a simple and relatively gentle way (relative, for example, botox) is with retinoids, including retinols or retinoic acids. Here’s some of the science of that; the paper is about treating acne, but the mechanism of action is the same (down-regulating the sebaceous glands’ action):

The treatment of severe cystic acne with 13-cis-retinoic acid: evaluation of sebum production and the clinical response in a multiple-dose trial

The potential side-effects, however were noted as:

• Cheilitis

• Desquamation of the skin

• Pruritus

Which, in translation from sciencese, means:

• Chapped lips

• Flaky skin

• Itchiness

Which aren’t necessarily fun, which is why with retinoids are best taken in very small doses at first to see how your skin reacts.

Remember when we said what your skin would be like without pores? This is what would happen, only much worse.

Take care!

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📖 ONE-MINUTE BOOK REVIEW

Hard to Kill: Master the Mindset to Maximize Your Years – by Dr. Jaime Seeman

We’ve written before about Dr. Seeman’s method for robust health at all ages, focussing on:

• Nutrition

• Movement

• Sleep

• Mindset

• Environment

In this book, she expands on these things far more than we have room to in our little newsletter, including (importantly!) how each interplays with the others. She also follows up with an invitation to take the “Hard to Kill 30-Day Challenge”.

That said, in the category of criticism, it’s only 152 pages, and she takes some of that to advertise her online services in an effort to upsell the reader.

Nevertheless, there’s a lot of worth in the book itself, and the writing style is certainly easy-reading and compelling.

Bottom line: this book is half instructional, half motivational, and covers some very important areas of health.

Click here to check out “Hard to Kill”, and enjoy robust health at every age!

May you find every reason to love the skin you’re in,

The 10almonds Team

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