Surely oil production helps your skin maintain health. This seems so much like common sense that I was flabbergasted when I ran into this thread. Please allow me to make an argument.
1. If you have painfully, dry, damaged, or chapped lips there is one thing that apparently relieves them more than anything. Rubbing the oil from your nose onto your lips.
2. If you wash your hands too frequently (I volunteered in hospitals and learned this the hard way), the soap strips away too much oil (and some top layers of skin) and your skin will become dry an uncomfortable... eventually prone to cracking, etc. Relief can come from skin oil or petroleum jelly... and obviously washing your hands less.
3. Washing your face during winter months when your skin tends to be less oily/drier as an adult leads to overly dry skin. It hurts. Why does it hurt? Because your skin needs oil.
4. It is an obvious fact that oil protects bird feathers and mammalian hair. Why not human skin?
5. Leather lasts longer if you condition it with oil. It makes it softer and more resistant to wear. Leather is skin....
6. To my touch, my wife's skin feels great in the morning, but dry and rough after taking a hot shower. Lack of oil anyone?
7. Surely when humans are exposed to the weather more and are not just sitting inside all day, the oil on the human skin protects it to a noticeable degree.
I find it impossible to believe that if we had zero oil production our skin would be perfectly healthy. It is there for a reason. Too much may be bad, but you need some. Too often physicians think everything is a sickness because that is how they are taught to see things. All humans are dying, riddled with illnesses and problems along the way. Well, I just don't think that is the way it works all the time.
This is an interesting question. Heres my opinion.
Human beings are the only mammals in the world that walk gracefully on two legs. The only other creature that walks upright is an aquatic bird, the penguin, but it is quite clumsy. Bipedalism is really rare.
Compared with running or walking on four legs, we dont have the sudden bursts of speed that four legged creatures are capable of, and we have more difficulty moving down steep terrain. We prefer a flat terrain.
Humans also sweat a lot more than other mammals, which gives us more long range endurance because we are slower to overheat. Its thought that three or four ancient humans would walk along the grasslands of Africa, and throw stones into the thickets by creeks, or shout, and scare out herbivores that would start running. We would select one animal and start jogging after it and follow it on the grasslands and through the thickets. As the animal tired, we would close in on it, and throw stones at it and it would start running again. After about an hour, the animal would drop its head because it was overheated and unable to run. The animal would simply stop moving. Then our ancestors would spear it, drag it home, and cook it. As a result we had a high protein, high fat diet that allowed our brains to grow and we became very social creatures, but were also very sweaty and oily.
To our current knowledge:
1. Moisture retention - Because sebum creates a protective barrier between the skin and the air, moisture loss is minimized. This helps to prevent premature lines, if you notice that people with dry skin seem to age much quicker and their skin often looks much worse as they age compared to someone who is an oil slick.
2. Some protection from the elements - it seems that oil helps to diminish the effects of the weather on the skin, i.e. cold, wind, rain, humidity because of the protective barrier it creates, again.
3. Ermmmm...even though we are told that a matte complexion is desirable, someone with dewy/shiny skin looks much healthier than someone with dry,cracked skin. We are attracted to 'healthy' looking complexions, because the skin often reflects the overall health of the person. So your parents got it on and made you.
This thread is awesome.
I'm not a science girl-but all i know is that i don't have wrinkles or crows feet. My same age friends do. Maybe it has nothing to do with each other since our genetics all differ of course. I smoked for 15 years, I ate terribly in my early 20's until I was forced to change my diet, I didn't drink enough water, and at times I used crap make-up. The only thing I did right was staying out of the sun. Very grateful I was smart about that.
It makes me think that my oily skin was always a good thing even though it's not the greatest to deal with. I'll take it over dry cracked skin.
