“I’m so sensitive,” says the woman sucking gunk out of my pores at a recent Hydrafacial. “And not like those girls with Sephora face,” she adds, referring to the particular brand of sensitivity that comes with layering on acids and retinol with reckless abandon. “I have real sensitive skin.”
If there were a club for skin types, you’d find those with sensitive skin separated from the crowd by a thick velvet rope, sipping their alcohol-free serums as they look down at the common folk drenched in added fragrance and glycolic acid. In short, having sensitive skin makes you a V.I.P.
One small issue: sensitive skin isn’t real—at least not in any medical sense. “If you open a dermatology textbook, you will never find a chapter or a section on sensitive skin,” says Dr. Rachel Westbay, a board-certified dermatologist in New York. According to Dr. Corey L. Hartman, a board-certified dermatologist in Alabama, sensitive skin isn’t even a diagnosis—“It’s more of an idea.”
And yet the number of people with sensitive skin seems to be on the perpetual rise. Anywhere from 30-to-70-plus percent of adults report having sensitive skin—a range that fluctuates based on the participants’ demographics, the time of year, and perhaps what the respondents had for lunch. That may explain why the global market for sensitive-skin-care products is expected to surpass $80 billion by 2030. The numbers are all the more perplexing given that sensitive skin was rarely reported in the scientific literature during the last century, and even outright questioned by biomedical scientists.
Have all our meat sacks somehow decayed over the last hundred or so years, leaving us red to the touch and itchy to the acid? Not quite. The oldest reference I was able to find in scientific journals was a 1986 article titled simply “Peau Sensible,” in the second edition of Les Cosmétiques, which, according to my public-high-school French, roughly translates to “Sensitive Skin” and “The Cosmetics,” respectively. “It really has roots in French-pharmacy skin care,” says Dr. Ranella Hirsch, a board-certified dermatologist in New York, confirming my hunch. “It was kind of like them reverse-engineering when they were trying to make products that were a little more gentle, like Vichy and Evian and all those kinds of things that were shown to reduce irritation.”
And before the lyrical “sensitive-skin syndrome” joined the skin-care canon, world-renowned dermatologist Dr. Howard Maibach first described the phenomenon in 1987 as “cosmetic-intolerance syndrome.”
But what does sensitive skin even mean? The closest thing we have to a definitive answer comes from the International Forum for the Study of Itch (I.F.S.I.), a very real and serious symposium of nearly 20 years. During a 2016 session of its special-interest group on sensitive skin, they identified it as: “A syndrome defined by the occurrence of unpleasant sensations (stinging, burning, pain, pruritus, and tingling sensations) in response to stimuli that normally should not provoke such sensations.”
With a definition lacking so many particulars—What if the tingles aren’t so much unpleasant as inconvenient? How long does it have to burn? Does it count if it only stings after a steamy shower?—comes an overly broad application of the term. “There are some people who are inherently and always sensitive,” Dr. Westbay explains. “And then if you have a condition like rosacea, which can be diagnosed at any point in your life, you are sensitive.”
There are also situations in which someone can become sensitive, including a newfound allergy, a reaction to vigorous exfoliation, or the introduction of Retin-A, when all hell breaks loose. According to I.F.S.I., these all fall under the same blanket category of sensitive skin. And yet the woman at my facial wore her sensitivity with pride, as if she were more attuned to the nuances of formulas and more thoughtful about what touches her precious visage.
But the truth remains: if “sensitive skin” is as wide-sweeping and vague as the scientists suggest, perhaps she’s no different than a tween with Sephora face. Sensitive skin is, in many ways, a marketing ploy meant to justify the price of that unscented, non-irritating, skin-soothing cream and appeal to those delicate flowers who are simply too refined for ordinary chemicals. It’s a touchy subject.
Danielle Cohen is a New York–based beauty writer whose work has appeared in Elle, Allure, Glamour, and Cosmopolitan, among other publications
