Can Your Partner’s Skin Microbiome Influence Yours?

A healthy and loving partnership can have a huge positive influence on your skin health. Among other things, being in a relationship increases your levels of oxytocin, the “bonding hormone.” It can also help to decrease stress, and ideally, you and your partner help to keep each other motivated with your healthy habits.

But there are also some other ways that your partner can influence your skin. Your partner’s skin microbiome can actually have an influence on your own. If you’ve ever started a new relationship and noticed that your skin health changed, this could be at least part of the explanation. 

Your partner’s skin microbiome can alter your own

I talk a lot about the gut microbiome – the collection of bacteria (and other microorganisms) that live inside your digestive tract. You also have a skin microbiome, consisting of bacteria that live on the surface of your skin. 

Your skin microbiome can affect your skin health in numerous ways. It can calm inflammation – or trigger it. It affects your skin’s ability to produce a healthy barrier, which is needed to keep out allergens and toxins. Your skin microbiome can even impact your skin’s ability to heal damage. Research has found an association between imbalances in the skin microbiome and common skin conditions like eczema and acne. 

You can influence your skin microbiome through the choices that you make, such as the type of cleanser that you use. And your partner’s skin microbiome can also influence your own.

When you and your partner have direct skin-to-skin contact, bacteria can easily be transferred from one person to the other. This allows the bacterial species that grow on their skin to spread to yours, and vice versa. Over time, your microbiome and theirs will tend to become more and more similar. 

The more time you and your partner spend together, the more your microbiomes will influence each other. It’s been shown that, for couples who live together, their skin microbiomes will come to resemble each other so closely that researchers can accurately predict which two individuals out of a larger group are partners, simply from samples of their skin microbiomes.

Your partner’s skincare products may also affect your skin microbiome

Another way that your partner’s skin can affect your microbiome is through the skincare products that they use.

The products that you choose to put on your own skin can affect your microbiome, promoting the growth of some species while inhibiting the growth of others. They can do this in lots of different ways. Some skincare products contain antimicrobial ingredients, which may affect certain species more than others. Some products alter the pH (acid balance) of your skin’s surface or create a lipid layer against the surface of the skin, altering the environment that the bacteria are growing in. There are some products that even provide nutrients for your microbiome – certain species of bacteria can get energy from certain fats, which may be contained in products like moisturizers, for example. 

When your partner applies their skincare products, some of these will remain on the surface of their skin. These can easily be transferred to your skin when it’s in contact with theirs – or even just on the surfaces that you both touch, like towels and sheets. If their skincare products are different from yours, then coming into contact with their products could alter the environment on the surface of your skin, which in turn could alter your skin microbiome.

How to manage skin microbiome changes

Although your partner’s skin microbiome influences your own, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In some cases, beneficial bacteria could be transferred from your partner’s skin to yours, leading to improvements in your skin health. At the same time, it’s also possible to get harmful bacteria from your partner’s skin. I sometimes see patients who started experiencing more skin flares or breakouts when they started a new relationship.

In some cases, these issues may be temporary. Over time, your skin microbiome may balance itself back out. However, you might need to make some changes to your skin care routine in order to compensate for the changes in your skin microbiome. For example, if you’re getting more breakouts than you used to, then you might need to cleanse your skin more often than you did before.

It’s best to be open with your partner about what’s going on with your skin. If their skincare products are affecting your skin, they might be willing to make some changes to their routine in order to help protect you. Even simple changes, like wearing long-sleeved pajamas to keep their nighttime moisturizer from getting onto you, might help. It’s always best to be open and authentic in a relationship, so don’t be afraid to share any concerns you have about your skin, so you and your partner can work together to decide how to best support both your skin health and theirs.

Sometimes, after a major change like a new partner, you might benefit from consulting a medical professional to help you get your skin back on track. As a doctor who’s trained in holistic skin health, I’m always happy to help people find ways to adjust various aspects of their skincare routine and lifestyle to help support their skin through new challenges. Whether it’s moving in with a new partner, moving to a new city, or any other major life change, adjusting your lifestyle can help to keep your skin as healthy as possible.