Vitiligo
Johanna loved her pigment spots as a child and likened herself to a cute Dalmatian dog. She simply thought it was only positive to be unique. It became all the more difficult in her teens when she developed increased vitiligo on her face. After her studies, Johanna chose to contact the groups in the world that studied the disease, in order to overcome her own. Eventually, she came into contact with a research group in England and packed her bags to spend five years doing her PhD there. Johanna and the group looked a lot at hydrogen peroxide and how vitiligo affected skin had an increased concentration of just that. Using a topical treatment that mimicked a certain enzyme, the team found a way to repigment the spots. Johanna underwent the treatment herself and regained 95% of the pigment on her face.
Questioning
Johanna was quickly contacted by the skin care industry in Sweden and started working as a skin researcher at a skin care institute in Stockholm. This led her to question how we produce skincare and she became fascinated by consumers' relationship with skin and skincare. People often see their skin as a problem and 70% of European women feel that they have sensitive skin. Why is this? Perhaps everything we apply to our skin is the problem itself? What caught Johanna's interest and made her go down the path she did was her growing interest in the skin's microbiome. In the podcast, Johanna talks in detail about what the skin microbiome really is and how important it is to take care of it. Johanna and Alexander also draw parallels with the gut flora and talk about how our most common skin conditions, such as acne and eczema, can be linked to imbalances in the microbiome, both in the gut flora and the skin flora.
The Skin Bible and 10-step routines
Johanna's book The Skin Bible has sold 40,000 copies in Sweden alone and has been translated into 6 different languages. It is a testament to how important the skin is to us humans and how little information is actually out there. We have so much knowledge about our health, for example, and understanding what is written on ingredient lists on food packaging is no art for most of us. If we compare it to skin care products, where we obviously have a huge interest, that knowledge is lacking and it is difficult for many of us, who are not chemists, to understand what is on the ingredient lists of our most common skin care products. It's not uncommon for a traditional skincare product to contain 50-100 ingredients and given today's trends of long skincare routines, skin can come into contact with upwards of 500 ingredients a day - which we have no idea what effect they actually have on our skin.
In the podcast, Johanna answers several exciting listener questions - maybe yours? Listen to the Success podcast with Johanna Gillbro today, click here!
