Is Social Media Ruining Your Skin? Misinformation, Filters, and Selling Hope in a Jar

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Ellie Rashid (0:59)

Here's what's coming up on today's episode.

Emma Craythorne (1:02)

Is social media making our skin better or is it making it worse?

Ellie Rashid (1:06)

Surely, they've done their due diligence. This is a respected journalist in a high quality magazine. But left, right and center, they're misquoting people that aren't dermatologists as dermatologists.

Emma Craythorne (1:17)

So the more time you spent on social media, the more product you bought and the worse your skin was.

Ellie Rashid (1:22)

Oh my gosh. Hello, and welcome to the After Hours Skin Clinic. I'm Dr. Ellie Rashid.

Emma Craythorne (1:32)

And I'm Dr. Emma Craythorne. We're both consultant dermatologists here in Central London.

Ellie Rashid (1:37)

But this is our favorite clinic where we unpack the evidence, challenge the trends and answer the questions that you might not always have time to ask your dermatologist.

Emma Craythorne (1:44)

And if you don't have one, you do now.

I thought we could do an episode that was related to whether social media is making our skin better or worse. And this comes off the back of having recently been at our British Association of Dermatology meetings and seeing many of the abstracts and presentations that have been presented by lots of our colleagues on this exact subject. And so on one side, we have people whose skin is getting better and they have more information about their health that can be put out on social media by people who know what they're talking about. And that information is amplified. And it's getting to people who might never have been able to get that message before.

And then on the other hand, we have got misinformation on a huge scale. We have trends and fads. And we have got certain aspects of skin health that is just going so extreme that it is starting to cause more and more problems, not just in the skin, but also in the confidence and the perception of people who are exposed to these trends. So I was thinking, is social media making our skin better or is it making it worse? And I thought we could chat about that.

Ellie Rashid (3:05)

I think it's a great subject to chat about because I feel conflicted on it. Because as you say, there is so much more information that's positively impacting people. Even something like our little podcast snippets that we put on social media. The number of patients that have come in and said, oh, I actually implemented that change and it's made a massive positive difference to my skin. But then there is just so much noise. It's hard to filter out the positive information and the coming from an educated standpoint information and with experience.

So I think the challenge is where you find that information and how you know whether the noise that's around it is actually good quality information or poor quality information. Because sometimes it's said with such confidence that you could just believe the world that that must be fact because it's said with such a degree of confidence.

Emma Craythorne (3:59)

So let's think about this. The post that you're seeing, you're likely to see that post if it is controversial information.

You're also likely to see the post more if the information is typically misinformation because in the comments below, people are quarreling over it and therefore, that post is more likely to be served to you. The next thing that happens is that it's hard to trust who you're actually getting that information from. Because the person who's delivering that information on the other side, can say that they are something. So they may say they're a skin specialist or they may say they're a dermatologist, and they may look like a dermatologist, because they're wearing scrubs and they're trying to deliver a message conveying that they have a lot of information about skin health. And you may be fooled into thinking that that person is, but that person isn't necessarily always the dermatologist.