What’s ‘slugging,’ and what do skin-care specialists consider this magnificence hack?

It’s uncommon for TikTok magnificence tendencies to carry advantage with dermatologists and aestheticians — with the overwhelming exception of “slugging.”

Slugging is a catchy time period which means slathering your face with petroleum jelly because the final step of your night skin-care routine. The follow leaves your face as slimy as slug mucus (therefore the title).

Supposedly initially a K-Beauty pattern, the time period slugging seems to have first surfaced in the USA in a 2014 publish in a Reddit subgroup. However it didn’t go viral till Charlotte Palermino, a New York-based licensed aesthetician and co-founder of skincare firm Dieux, launched the idea to her TikTok and Instagram followers in September 2020, telling them it had made her dry pores and skin “juicy.” As of press time, the hashtag #slugging has 235.5 million views on TikTok.

Petroleum jelly, which is often known as petrolatum and was first bought by Vaseline, is a white or yellowish semisolid substance made up of a combination of advanced hydrocarbons by dewaxing crude oil. In line with Joshua Zeichner, a dermatologist and affiliate professor of dermatology at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, it’s an occlusive ingredient: “It varieties a seal over the stratum corneum (outer layer of pores and skin or pores and skin barrier) to guard the pores and skin from the surroundings whereas stopping water loss.”

By forming this seal — which retains grime and micro organism out and moisture in — the petroleum jelly creates the perfect surroundings to permit your pores and skin to repair itself, Zeichner stated. And, he and Palermino stated, slugging doesn’t require a lot petroleum jelly. You should use a pea-size portion in your whole face.

Although slugging is a brand new title for it, the act of making use of petroleum jelly as a pores and skin protectant is nothing new. Within the fifteenth century, members of the Native American Seneca tribe, who dug oil pits in northwestern Pennsylvania, used petroleum jelly on human and animal pores and skin to guard wounds, stimulate therapeutic, and maintain the pores and skin moist. Within the late nineteenth century, American chemist Robert Chesebrough, visiting oil fields in the identical space of northwestern Pennsylvania, noticed oil employees making use of the residue from their oil drills on their wounds. Chesebrough introduced a pattern again to his Brooklyn lab, purified it, examined it on his self-inflicted wounds, and in 1870 branded his “miracle jelly” as Vaseline.

Though petroleum jelly is taken into account non-comedogenic (which means it gained’t clog pores) as a result of its molecular measurement is simply too giant to penetrate deep into the pores and skin, Massachusetts dermatologist Ranella Hirsch warned that slugging isn’t for everybody. “Typically talking, I don’t are inclined to advocate it for people who find themselves liable to milia, oily or pimples. I simply discover occlusives aren’t a great marriage for them.” Hirsch recommends patch-testing first for these pores and skin situations and whether or not you’re liable to allergic reactions.

For severely dry pores and skin, Susan Taylor, a Philadelphia-based dermatologist and founding father of the Skin of Color Society, warns that petroleum jelly, alone, won’t moisturize the pores and skin. “I’ve my sufferers put the petroleum jelly over a moisturizer that has humectant and emollient substances.” Taylor additionally tells sufferers to use petroleum jelly when pores and skin is damp to “entice within the moisture.”