Introducing Ask the Scientist

Greetings, skin microbiome enthusiasts.

There is a new page on my website. It is called Ask the Scientist, and I want to tell you what it is, because it is not a marketing page and I do not want it mistaken for one.

What It Is

Skincare borrowed a lot of its vocabulary from microbiology. Microbiome. Probiotic. Strain. Barrier. Almost none of those words arrived with their definitions attached.

So I started writing the definitions down.

Ask the Scientist is a series of articles about the biology underneath skincare. Not routines. Not product recommendations. The actual science, with the papers linked so you can check my work.

It is organized into six areas: the skin microbiome, live probiotics, skin health, ingredients, research, and myth versus fact.

What Is On It Right Now

Three articles are published.

The first is What Is the Skin Microbiome? That one is the foundation. Everything else builds on it.

The second is What Are Live Probiotics? This is where I lay out the formal definition of the word, the one agreed by the scientists who study these organisms, and explain why most products using it on a skincare label do not meet it.

The third went up this week. Why Do Strain Names Matter? It is about how microorganisms are named, what the genus, the species and the strain each tell you, and why a claim is only as good as the level of the name it rests on.

There Is No Sign-Up Form

I want to be clear about this part.

There is no email capture on that page. No gated content. No lead magnet. No form you have to fill in to read the third paragraph.

I am not collecting anything.

I dig into the literature, put the evidence together, and write it up as a scientist. If it is useful to you, read it. That is the whole arrangement.

The Part I Did Not Expect

Here is what has surprised me.

Writing this series has become a check on everything else I have published.

When we launched, every claim on my packaging and my website was reviewed and approved by my regulatory consultants. We were extremely conservative. There were benefits I chose not to mention at all, because at that point I had a hypothesis and not yet the data.

But a website is not a fixed object. Over the years you collect more data. You add pages. You bring in other people, marketing, developers, advisors on how to reach customers. All of them good at their jobs, all writing.

Language drifts. A sentence written quickly last year ends up sitting beside a claim that was carefully worded two years ago, and slowly the two stop matching.

So now, every time I finish an article, I go back through the rest of my site and look for anywhere I am saying something that does not line up with what I just published.

It finds things. Wording that had crept slightly ahead of the evidence. A phrase on a product page that no longer matched a definition on the science page. Something I wrote a long time ago and had forgotten was there.

Then I fix it. Sometimes that means deleting a sentence I liked.

I could not do this before. As a solopreneur, there is no way I can hold every claim on every page in my head and check each new thing against all of it. There is just too much of it. That work used to simply not happen.

Now it happens every week.

A Page With Nothing to Sell Can Afford to Be Honest

This is why the no-sign-up part matters more than it looks.

Because that page has no commercial job, it can afford to contradict my own product copy. And it has. More than once.

If I had built it to sell something, it could not do that. It would have to agree with me.

Every Sunday

A new article goes up every Sunday.

The next ones are about whether probiotics actually need to be alive, and the difference between live probiotics and postbiotics. That second one is my favorite subject, and I will warn you now, it is not flattering to my industry.

You can see what is coming next on the page itself. There is a list.

If you want to follow along, save the link and check on a Sunday, or follow the Fafabiotic page on LinkedIn where I post each one as it goes live.

fafabiotic.com/ask-the-scientist

Until Next Blog, Cheers