I am an esthetician and want to understand the science. If OTC amounts of hypo. acid are so effective at killing pathogens on the skin by damaging the cell wall, etc., then why doesn’t it harm skim cells as well through the same mechanism?
In: Biology
It does.
Your topmost layer of skin is almost entirely old dead skin cells, which protects the live cells just underneath from some types of physical damage.
That slippery feeling when you get it on your skin? That’s the top layer of skin cells sloughing off.
If you kept your hands in undiluted bleach or related chlorine solutions for an extended period it would start to damage the tissues underneath.
It does, but you’re protected in a way single-celled life isn’t.
You are not one thing. You are legion, and you have scales like tenfold shields: your outer layer of dead cells. *Those* chemically break down. The bacteria have no such armor. Their fresh, living cells are right there, touching the acid, slurping it up. This kills them.
Now, if you *drank* that hypochlorous acid, that would be a different story! That would be you doing to yourself what the bacteria does to itself.
This is one of the many advantages of being a multicellular organism. Even the dead legions may still serve the whole. But you then become weak to things that can’t affect single cells, like cancer; lone wolf cells can’t be betrayed by their own.
[removed]
[removed]
[removed]
[removed]
Because your skin cells are protected behind dozens of layers of dead skin cells that have been keratinized.
Bacteria also have kind of an ablative armor in the form of biofilm (a mixture of polysaccharides and protein that they pump out to protect the colony), but hypochlorous acid is especially good at penetrating that biofilm (white blood cells also use it for that exact purpose) while it’s not so good at dissolving the layers and layers of keratinized dead skin cell that form the ablative armor for the living parts of your skin.
Latest Answers