Your skin is an ecosystem. Most of what goes wrong with it is ecology.
A reference library on the bacteria, the fungi, and the nano-microbes that keep them in check — and why a disturbed balance sits underneath rosacea, eczema, acne, and how skin ages. Every claim here is sourced to primary literature.
For a century, skin disease meant one question: which germ, and how do we kill it? The microbiome reframed it. Your skin carries a dense community — bacteria, fungi, and the phages that prey on them — and health is the balance between them, not the absence of any one member.
When that balance tips — a term researchers call dysbiosis — the same conditions keep appearing: redness that won't settle, barriers that leak, follicles that inflame. This library walks the evidence for each, and shows what you can actually measure on your own skin.
A community lives in the terrain of your skin
Microbes are not a film sitting on the surface. They occupy distinct niches — the oily plain, the follicle, the gland — each its own habitat with its own residents. Where they live explains why some conditions are surface problems and others begin deep in the pore.
↓ Read the basics in The skin microbiome, explained
Where dysbiosis shows up
Six of the most-searched skin conditions where the evidence points past the surface, to the community living on it. Each entry: what is known, what is still uncertain, and what you can measure.
Before the conditions, the foundations
The skin microbiome, explained
What actually lives on skin, what “dysbiosis” means, and why an imbalance — not a single germ — underlies most chronic skin conditions.
Start here →What a bacteriophage does
Phages are nano-microbes that infect only bacteria — often a single species or strain. That precision is why they're studied to correct dysbiosis without scorching the whole community.
How it works →Made to be checked
This is a publication of Parallel Health, a precision-dermatology company. We're transparent about that because credibility comes from sources, not anonymity.