Designing a good cosmetic product for sensitive skin is first and foremost a response to a very specific problem. Knowing the condition and needs of the skin makes it possible to choose the ingredients to be used and to optimize the most suitable galenic. The experts gathered by Cosmed during its Cosmed Scientific and Technical Exchange Day on 11 October provided some answers to the many questions raised by this subject.
The first speaker of the day, Professor Philipe Humbert, head of the Dermatology department at Besançon University Hospital, identified the terms of the debate. "Sensitive skin syndrome was first described in 1977," he recalled,"by Albert Kligman, the father of"invisible dermatoses", when the skin is sick without being seen.
A syndrome that Professor Henri Thiers then explained in his treatise on cosmetology (1986), where he writes: "We usually find ourselves in the presence of a woman in her thirties, often with a clear complexion… Recently, she has been complaining that her face, rarely her hands as well, reacts annoyingly to any local product, from the most ordinary to the most sophisticated. In the seconds that follow, the patient feels a feeling of heat and burning rather than pruritus. The treated skin reddens immediately and strongly but without immediate urticaria or late vesiculation. In a few hours, sometimes only the next day, everything calms down, then, erythema having stopped, occurs after 24/48 hours a fine and temporary furfuraceous desquamation. One is struck by the intensity of the erythema, that of the burning sensation, the discretion of the desquamation, the absence of symptoms belonging to the allergy… The patient is …
