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
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.
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