Jan 20, 2020

How Dry Skin Can Compromise Your Training

Dry Skin, Bacterial Infection, Ringworm...Your Soap May Be To Blame

Brazilian Jiu Jitsu Soap companies have been telling customers that their soap must contain essential oils for years. They boast about the antibacterial or anti-fungal properties essential oils possess. The part they leave out is how drying and potentially irritating the constant use of essential oils can be. More importantly, they leave out what that dryness and irritation can lead to, infection.

This dryness and irritation is related to one of the main components found in essential oils, Terpinens. When used in soaps, terpinens can and do strip the skin of its ability to retain moisture naturally. Terpinens are essentially chemicals found in plants that protect the plant from whatever is trying to harm them. One of these terpinens, Cineole, has a skin drying effect and is commonly found in essential oils that possess antibacterial and antifungal properties.

Learning how to protect your skin does not take a PhD or even a medical degree to understand. Your skin is naturally not sterile. A quick Google search will show that our skin has its own natural flora on it which acts as a protective barrier to the outside world. Underneath this protective layer is the acid mantle, a very fine, slightly acidic film on the surface of human skin. When the two layers are intact they work in harmony with each other preventing you from catching any one of the nasty bugs we talked about in an earlier post. When one layer isn't working right it puts pressure on the other to protect the skin. This creates and imbalance and increases the probability for opportunistic pathogens to establish themselves and create a biofilm.

At Contact Sports Soap we wanted to deliver a quality BJJ soap that worked in conjunction with the natural defenses of your skin. We did this by developing a new way to approach an age old problem without the need for drying essential oils. We use the same time-tested soap making methods, but with a 21st century technological twist. Instead of just using soap and essential oils, we use soap which contains billions of live colony forming beneficial microbes. This may seem counter intuitive to a consumer who has been told for years that they need to kill everything to prevent skin infections but we do so with good reason.

The probiotics in our body wash have a naturally moisturizing effect by promoting ceramide production, which are healthy lipids naturally found in skin that trap moisture and strengthen the skin barrier. To further ensure your skin is taken care of we add avocado oil and omega 3s as natural moisturizers. Moreover, the beneficial microbes block bad bacteria and fungus from establishing biofilm and even defeat gram negative bacteria when in competition for existing space. Our probiotic soap combines the breakthrough technology of topical products with advanced natural cleansers and conditioners to keep you performing at the highest level without having to worry about conditions commonly associated with contact sports.