Li
Linoleic Acid
Linoleic AcidBarrier
A fatty acid your body can’t make, and part of skin’s barrier fats along with ceramides and cholesterol.
What it does
It’s one of two fatty acids your body can’t make. In skin, it’s part of the barrier fats and a building block of a ceramide. People with acne have been found to have low levels on the skin’s surface; one paper suggested this helps clog pores but didn’t test it, and no study has tried a linoleic-rich oil on acne.
The evidence, graded
expert consensusFungal acne is Malassezia folliculitis — an overgrowth of a yeast already living in normal skin flora, commonly mistaken for ordinary acne. In a culture dish the yeast grows only when fatty acids longer than C10 are added, because it cannot make its own. That is why Drop holds lipid-rich products back while you have this flagged. No source Drop has read tested an oil on skin, set an upper chain length, or showed squalane, MCT or mineral oil to be safe.Rubenstein 2014 · Journal of Clinical and Aesthetic Dermatology ↗
emergingCeramides, cholesterol and free fatty acids are three lipids the skin barrier needs. In studies on damaged skin, mostly in mice, putting on one or two of them slowed repair, while equal amounts of all three let it recover normally. Raising any one of the three, up to three times the others, sped repair further. Early tests on damaged human skin looked similar.Man 1996 · Journal of Investigative Dermatology ↗
emergingPeople with acne have been found to have low linoleic acid in their skin-surface lipids. A 1986 paper proposed, as a hypothesis, that this leaves the lining of the pore short of an essential fatty acid, so it thickens and plugs. The paper did not test putting linoleic acid or any oil on skin.Downing 1986 · Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology ↗
Graded per the methodology: strong · moderate · emerging · expert consensus. A weak source on a strong claim gets the weaker label.
Also known as
omega-6 fatty acid
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