Skin during and after cancer treatment
Skin during and after cancer treatment
If you are going through treatment, or you are buying for someone who is, this page is for you. It is written by the person who makes the products, and it tells you what I actually know, where the published evidence sits, and where it stops.
What happens to skin during treatment
The biology
Treatment does not only act on the tumour. It acts on cells that divide quickly, and the outer layer of your skin is one of the fastest dividing tissues you have. That is why skin so often turns dry, thin, tight and suddenly reactive to things that never bothered it before.
Once that outer layer thins, two things happen at once. Water leaves faster than it should, and the outside world gets in more easily than it should. So the skin becomes inflamed. Inflamed skin itches and stings, itching and stinging keep you awake, and being awake at three in the morning makes everything else harder to carry.
This is the part almost nobody says out loud. Your skin is not a separate problem from how exhausted and short tempered you feel. The barrier, inflammation and the nervous system sit on the same circuit, and you cannot pull on one without moving the other two.
Which is why I will not describe comfortable skin as a nice extra. Comfortable skin is a need, not a want.
You are not unusual
If your skin has changed, you are in the majority, not the minority. In a supportive care trial of women who had finished standard treatment for early breast cancer, dry skin was present in 88 percent of them at the point they enrolled (Dalenc et al., 2017). In a study of lung cancer patients on targeted therapy, 81.6 percent developed a skin reaction of some kind, with dry skin in nearly half (Gisondi et al., 2021). In patients on a different targeted agent, skin reactions peaked at around three quarters of them by the second month (Bouché et al., 2019).
I include the references because you should be able to check me. Nobody gets to tell you how your skin works and then ask you to take their word for it.
What I look for in something you can put on skin like this
A short ingredient list.
Every additional ingredient is one more thing skin has to tolerate. On a page like this, fewer is not minimalism as an aesthetic. It is arithmetic.
No added perfume.
Perfume is the single most common reason a cream stings skin that has become reactive. There is no version of this brand that adds it.
Lipids, not just water.
Skin that is losing water faster than usual needs the fats that hold it in, not another light lotion that evaporates and leaves it tighter than before.
A jar you can actually open.
Sore hands, sore fingertips, no grip. If a lid needs two strong hands, it is the wrong lid. I think about this because I watched it matter.
What I am not going to tell you
There is a version of this page that would sell more than this one. It would suggest that a cream can undo what treatment does to skin. It cannot, and I am not going to imply otherwise, however well it would convert.
What I can tell you is exactly what is in the jar, why each thing is in there, and where the published evidence sits. Where the evidence is thin I will say it is thin. Where I am going on twenty years of looking at human tissue rather than on a trial, I will say that too.
And I would rather you used less of the right thing than more of the wrong thing. If the answer for your skin this week is one product and nothing else, that is the answer I will give you, even though it is the worse answer for me.
Please speak to your team first
Before you put anything new on skin that is being treated, including anything of mine, speak to your oncology or radiotherapy team.
If you are having radiotherapy, your team will give you specific instructions about the treatment area, including what may and may not go on it and when. Those instructions come first, every time, over anything you read here or anywhere else. They know your case, your dose and your schedule. I do not.
Born of Necessity products are cosmetics. They are made for skin comfort. They are not medicines, they do not treat any condition, and they play no part in your treatment.
Restore
Restore
A rich, unperfumed balm for skin that has become dry, tight and easily upset. Short ingredient list. Barrier lipids and humectants, and nothing in there to make the label look busier.
Use as little or as much as you need, on the areas that feel tight. Patch test a small area first and leave it a day, particularly if your skin has started reacting to things it used to tolerate.
Why this exists
When my mum was diagnosed with cancer, we went looking for something we could put on her skin. Everything gentle enough felt like nothing at all. Everything that felt like something was far too much for her. And almost nothing felt like a treat, which is the part I had not expected to matter and which turned out to matter more than any of it.
Those few minutes were hers. In a diary that had filled up with other people's appointments, it was the only one she had made herself.
I am a Specialist Biomedical Scientist, registered with the HCPC, with over twenty years in NHS cellular pathology. I know what happens to tissue under stress because I have spent my working life looking at it. But I did not start formulating because of the science. I started because of her.
Guided by science, perfected by motherhood.
Questions people ask me
Is it safe to use during treatment?
These are cosmetic products made for skin comfort, with no added perfume and short ingredient lists. But safe for your skin, this week, in your circumstances, is a question for your oncology or radiotherapy team, and it is the right question to ask them. Take the ingredient list with you. It is published in full on every product page for exactly this reason.
Can I use it on the radiotherapy area?
Ask your radiotherapy team and do what they tell you. They give specific instructions about the treatment area and those instructions override anything I could say. I am not going to guess on your behalf.
Everything stings at the moment. Where do I start?
Start smaller than you think. One product, a patch test on a small area, and a day of waiting before you go further. Skin that has become reactive is not being difficult. It is telling you the barrier is thin, and the answer is usually less, applied more often, not more, applied harder.
How long until my skin feels comfortable again?
I am not going to give you a number, because anyone who does is guessing. What I can tell you is that the outer layer of skin renews itself continuously, so skin is not a fixed situation, and comfort tends to arrive before appearance does. Judge it on how it feels, not on how it looks in the bathroom mirror.
Is it fragrance free?
No perfume is added, and there is no synthetic fragrance. Some of the botanical oils contain naturally occurring compounds that UK law requires to be listed, and we list every one of them on every product. We do not use a blanket fragrance free claim across the range, because it would not be true of all of it and I am not going to print something that is not true.
I am buying this for someone else. Will the packaging make it obvious?
No. Nothing on the outer packaging or the delivery note mentions cancer, and there is no wording that announces why the parcel has arrived. You can add a message at checkout. A lot of people ordering for a friend or a parent ask this, and they are right to.
Nature provides the idea. I add the science.