Skin type VI, absent from the trials : why our skin is treated in the dark

The figure says something uncomfortable. The industry that sells us the most certainty is the one that holds the least about our skin. Shelf space expands, routines go from three steps to twelve, and the evidence base underneath stays narrow, old, and built elsewhere. Caring for your skin in the Maghreb today often means applying protocols designed for other skin, in other climates, on the strength of claims that are rarely verifiable.

That raises a plain question, and not a cosmetic one : what happens if you stop treating your skin as a permanent correction site, and start treating it as a place you live in ?

What is actually known, and since when ?

The established ground in dermatology is small enough to say in one breath : cleanse without stripping, moisturise, protect from the sun. Everything past that sits at varying degrees of certainty.

Photoprotection is the best documented point. The Australian Nambour trial, whose results on skin ageing were published by Maria Celia Hughes and colleagues in the Annals of Internal Medicine in 2013, remains the reference : adults assigned to daily sunscreen use showed no detectable worsening of skin ageing after four and a half years, against measurable progression in the discretionary use group. That trial is more than ten years old. It is still cited because nobody has produced better since, which tells you a great deal about the state of funding for non-commercial dermatological research.

Barrier function is the central concept everything else organises around. The skin barrier is the outermost layer of the epidermis, an assembly of dead cells and lipids that holds water in and keeps aggressors out. Intact, it tolerates almost anything. Breached, everything stings, including the products bought to repair it.

The rest of the aisle divides between the debated and the unvalidated. Some actives have solid data on precise indications. Many others circulate with numbered promises drawn from brands' internal studies, unpublished and uncontrolled. The useful rule is not to reject everything. It is to know which category you are standing in before you buy.

Can a long routine damage skin ?

Yes, and the mechanism has been known for a long time. It has a name : cumulative irritant contact dermatitis.

In a review published in Current Dermatology Reports in 2022, dermatologists Kajal Patel and Rosemary Nixon set out the principle. This dermatitis does not result from a single violent assault. It comes from multiple insults below the reaction threshold, when the interval between two exposures is too short for the skin barrier to recover fully. The authors note the converse as well : lengthening the interval between exposures generally reduces the risk of irritation. They recall that the multiplication of handwashing during the Covid-19 pandemic translated into a clear rise in the incidence of irritant dermatitis.

Translate that into the language of the beauty aisle. A foaming cleanser morning and night, an acid exfoliant three times a week, a retinoid in the evening, a vitamin C serum in the morning, two masks a week on top : that is a long chain of sub-threshold insults with no recovery window. Skin does not collapse all at once. It turns reactive, red, tight, and then one more product goes on to treat the symptom the previous ones produced. The logic of the multi-step routine contains its own maintenance loop.

None of this condemns rituals. A long routine is not dangerous in itself. What is dangerous is stacking irritant actives with no rest. A woman who loves her quarter hour in the evening, her textures, her gesture, has no reason to give it up. The question is not how long the ritual lasts, it is how aggressive its contents are.

What research says, and does not say, about traditional Maghrebi care

This is where the ground gets slippery, in both directions. Traditional use is not proof of efficacy. Nor is it a mistake to be corrected.

A survey conducted by Sara Marraha, Salim Gallouj and Ouiame ElJouari, of the dermatology department at CHU Mohammed VI and Abdelmalek Essaadi University in Tangier, published in Cosmoderma in 2025 among 582 Moroccan respondents, gives a useful snapshot. Sixty per cent say they use traditional remedies for skin or hair. Close to eight in ten credit them with high efficacy.

The next figure deserves a pause : 17.2 % report adverse effects, redness, itching, burning or hair loss. And only 6.5 % consulted a dermatologist about it. The gap between the incident and the consultation is the real lesson of this study. The problem is not tradition. It is that its side effects never reach a medical practice, and therefore never reach the literature. Eight respondents in ten also combine traditional and industrial products, which makes attribution harder still.

On argan oil there is one randomised controlled trial. One. Kenza Qiraouani Boucetta, Zoubida Charrouf and colleagues from Mohammed V University in Rabat, Ibn Tofail University in Kenitra and Hassan II University in Casablanca published it in Clinical Interventions in Aging in 2015. Sixty postmenopausal women, two months, skin elasticity measured on the forearm : elasticity parameters improved significantly, both with dietary intake and with topical application. That is a real result, obtained by a Moroccan team on a Moroccan product. It is also a sample of sixty people, measured on a forearm, eleven years ago, never replicated at larger scale. To say that argan has proven efficacy on every woman's face would be an extrapolation the authors themselves do not make.

For ghassoul (the Moroccan mineral clay used as a wash for skin and hair), savon noir (the traditional olive-based black soap of the hammam), the kessa exfoliating glove and rose water, the situation is clearer still : no accessible clinical study currently supports the claims in circulation. Documented traditional use, yes. Clinically demonstrated efficacy, no, for want of studies. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence of effect : it is an absence of research, and that absence is itself a social fact.

The beauty market in the Maghreb

• Morocco : market estimated at around 8 billion dirhams, foreign brands capturing close to 65 % of turnover (La Vie éco, 2025) • Tunisia : cosmetics sector valued at 1.77 billion dinars, around 1.6 % of GDP and some 20,000 direct and indirect jobs (Chroniques, June 2025) • Algeria : import bill for cosmetics and perfumes brought down from around

Why is our skin less well studied ?

500 to 58 million dollars, against a backdrop of rising local production (Ministry of Trade figures relayed by El Moudjahid, January 2025) Because research protocols were calibrated on other skin, and the bias fed itself.

The reference article by Jean Krutmann and colleagues on photoprotection for pigmented skin, published in the British Journal of Dermatology in 2023, sets out the problem and clears away a stubborn misconception on the way. Melanin offers real intrinsic protection against ultraviolet. It offers none against pigmentary disorders. The authors point out that long UVA and visible light induce skin pigmentation in skin types III to VI. Which means : melasma and post-inflammatory hyperpigmentation, the two most frequent reasons for consultation among Maghrebi women, are triggered by a light spectrum that most conventional sunscreens do not filter. Tinted formulations containing iron oxides do offer protection against visible light.

This information travels badly. It is nonetheless more useful than any brightening serum, and it also explains why so many anti-dark-spot protocols fail : they treat the consequence without blocking the cause. Krutmann and his team close by underlining the limited data available on populations with pigmented skin. It is the same gap the Boston team measured in sunscreen trials. Only a third of those trials included skin type IV.

The mirror, the filter, and the distance between them

Aesthetic pressure no longer comes mainly from magazines. It comes from our own retouched reflection.

Several papers published in 2024 in the journal Computers in Human Behavior examined the effect of augmented reality filters on body satisfaction. One result keeps coming back : the comparison effect is strongest when a person applies the filter to her own image, more so than when she looks at someone else's filtered image. The point of reference stops being another woman. It becomes a corrected version of oneself, available at any hour, which the real face structurally cannot match.

That is the mechanism that feeds the aisle. Skin read as a gap to close calls for one more product. Skin read as a place you live in calls for upkeep, which is not the same economy.

That economy can be measured, and for the first time in this issue it can be measured in the Maghreb. Two public statistical institutes have published what households actually spend.

What the hygiene and care line weighs

• Tunisia : 609 dinars per person per year in 2021, against 363 dinars in 2015 (National Institute of Statistics, EBCNV 2021 survey) • Tunisia : 11.1% of household spending in 2021, against 9.4% in 2015 (same source) • Morocco : 3.9% of consumption spending in 2022, against 2.7% in 2014 (High Commission for Planning, survey of 18,000 households conducted between March 2022 and March 2023)

Two reserves, and they matter. The Tunisian line lumps together health, hygiene and personal care, so it does not measure beauty alone, and part of its rise is medical spending. The INS itself attributes some of the increase to the Covid-19 epidemic, whose peak coincided with data collection, and states that these coefficients cannot be used to update the price index basket. The Moroccan line, narrower, still does not separate what is soap from what is serum.

What they do say, they say together : the line grows faster than the budget containing it, in two countries, across two independent surveys, over periods that do not overlap. Spending on the upkeep of the body is gaining ground on budgets that are not widening. This is not market data produced by the industry. These are household accounts, kept by public institutes.

Living in your skin, in this context, is not a posture of

The Sultane view

renunciation. It is a technical position : accepting that skin has its own workings, its recovery cycles, needs that cannot be deduced from a feed. And that those workings are hindered, not served, by stacking.

There is no virtue in owning three products rather than twelve. Swap the injunction of the full routine for the injunction of minimalism and the constraint has only moved, with the same machinery of guilt attached. Women who love their Friday hammam, their ghassoul, their long slow ritual, have nothing to revise.

What deserves revising is the asymmetry. We buy in a market where foreign brands capture most of Moroccan turnover, where product claims are almost never backed by published trials, and where skin like ours appears in only a third of sunscreen trials, when it appears at all. The correction will not come from a better organised shelf. It will come from Maghrebi laboratories that publish, from dermatologists consulted when a product burns, and from one plain demand, made before purchase : which study is this promise resting on ?

B. Zine EzZine