How Water Quality Affects Your Skin & Hair: Hydration, Tap Water Contaminants & Health

How Water Quality Affects Your Skin & Hair: Hydration, Tap Water Contaminants & Health

Roughly half of American adults engage in a daily skincare routine — that's 39% of men and 60% of women.¹ Millions of people buy moisturizers, cleansers, creams, balms, exfoliators and toners in hopes of keeping their skin healthy, clean, young and spotless. Yet, most people overlook one crucial factor: the impact of contaminated water on our skin and bodies.

Proper hydration and contaminant-free showers are actually key elements to skin health, staving off dryness, discoloration, blemishes, eye bags and even illness.

Water Quality and Skin Health: Why Hydration and Clean Water Matter

Up to 60% of the human body is made of water. Accordingly, it should come as no surprise that there is a direct link between drinking enough water and keeping your skin hydrated and healthy. 

A properly hydrated body benefits from an increase in skin elasticity. That means an increase in the springiness and pliancy that allows skin to "snap back" to its familiar shape after being pinched. As we age, our bodies naturally go through elastosis, the loss of elastin and collagen, resulting in sagging skin and fine line wrinkles. While there are many effective defense mechanisms against elastosis — limiting exposure to the sun, avoiding cigarettes, having a diet high in antioxidants — staying hydrated may be the simplest and most immediately gratifying. 

Water is not a magic elixir for those hoping to have young and healthy skin. Sadly, it won't smooth your wrinkles, unclog your pores or erase your skin spots. However, studies show that adults that drink healthy amounts of water absolutely benefit from hydrated skin.² 

What Are the Benefits of Drinking Water for Skin?

When your body isn't sufficiently hydrated, your skin can suffer from all manner of afflictions:

• Dryness

• Itchiness or sensitivity

Dehydration can disrupt the uppermost layer of skin, compromising the moisture barrier that protects you from irritants like smoke, outdoor pollutants and chemicals in household products. 

• Paleness or dullness

Lack of hydration can cause dead skin cells to build up and flake off. This can give the skin a greyish or ashen luster that's a stark contrast from its desired glow. 

• Sunken eyes
  When you are dehydrated, the fatty pads around your eyes lose moisture and begin to shrink. When the plump skin around your eyelids begins to diminish, they leave dark areas beneath the eyes, causing them to look "hollow," "tired" or "sunken"

• Eye bags

Conversely, dehydration can also have the opposite effect with the emergence of  puffy eye bags. When the body is perpetually under-hydrated, it reacts by retaining fluid in spots where tissue is the loosest. One of the most vulnerable spots is under the eyes. 

• Facial "shadows" around the eyes and nose 

• Dehydration lines

Dryness can lead to "dehydration lines," the fine, dry lines that can cause your face to have the thin and fragile appearance of crepe paper. Found primarily in places where the face loses moisture — the forehead, under the eyes, in the corners of your mouth — dehydration lines may make your face feel taut or "pulled." 

• Acne

When faced with a lack of moisture, the body may overcompensate by producing too much oil. Combine that oil with dead skin cells and you've got the recipe for a breakout. 

• Decreased Cellular Turnover

Cellular turnover is your skin's way of regenerating itself, a natural process when dead skin cells are replaced by new ones. This process, which takes around four to six weeks, is what keeps your skin feeling smooth and looking vibrant. Proper hydration leads to skin cells turning over more efficiently. Healthy cellular turnover reduces your risk of age spots, wrinkles and acne. A good turnover also boosts your skin's defense mechanism, making wounds heal faster. 

Can Tap Water Contaminants Harm Your Skin?

Invisible contaminants lurk inside in the tap water we drink. Troublesome pollutants blast from the faucets we use to wash our hands and the showers we use to clean our bodies. Surely, your skin depends on adequate hydration to stay radiant, elastic, youthful and strong, but poor water quality can prevent you from reaching your full potential. Certain impurities may even prove detrimental to skin health. Even minimal amounts of these substances can disrupt your skin microbiome balance.³ Here are just a few of the unwelcome chemicals and organisms in your water:

• Bacteria

Your showerhead serves as a prime breeding ground for a colorful combination of bacteria. In the hours between your shower sessions, the last length of pipe and the shower head itself lie damp, dank and untouched — the perfect storm for microbes to set up shop. Every time you turn on your shower it can be like unleashing a petri dish. While most of these bacteria are harmless, certain ones like nontuberculous mycobacteria and pseudomonas aeruginosa can lead to skin infections.^{4, 5} 

• Arsenic
  Arsenic in drinking water has been linked to both skin lesions and skin cancers.⁶

What Are Hard Water's Skin Effects?

Water that's high in mineral content, better known as "hard water," is teeming with things like calcium and magnesium. This is why the holes in your shower head often get "calcified" with hard gunk. When combined with the chemicals in your soaps and shampoos, hard water turns them insoluble, forming a solid residue on the skin. That solid residue can clog or block pores, leading to acne. Hard water can also raise the skin's pH level, disrupting the skin's abilities to function as a barrier and making it more susceptible to conditions like eczema.⁷  

What is Chlorine's Effect on Skin Health?

Chlorine is commonly used to disinfect tap water at treatment plants across the country. While this sounds scary, it's actually a crucial step in ensuring that drinking water is free of viruses, bacteria, pathogens and other harmful organisms. All that chlorine is preventing you from getting foodborne illnesses like cholera, but it can still do quite a number on your skin. 

Have you ever turned on your shower and gotten a "bleachy" smell? That's likely chlorine coursing through your pipes. Chlorine can strip your skin of the natural oils it uses to moisturize itself, resulting in dryness or irritation. Even tiny bits of chlorine can negatively affect people with existing conditions like atopic dermatitis.⁸

Can Tap Water Contaminants Harm Your Hair?

It should come as no surprise that the same shower that can be irritating your skin and clogging your pores could be doing significant damage to your hair. Chlorine, especially, can wreak havoc on your hair's strength and vitality. Some of the ways unwanted chemicals can affect your hair include:

• Loss of natural oils and lipids

Chlorine is especially effective at stripping your head of its natural oils. This can mean not only an itchy or flaky scalp, but may cause your hair to be dry, brittle and more susceptible to breakage. 

• Weakened keratin bonds

Chlorine bonds with keratin, the protein that makes up your hair, causing weakening, frizziness, split ends and general unmanageability.

• Change in color

Anyone with light hair who has spent time in a swimming pool knows the damage that water can do to your hair color, especially after going in blonde and coming out green. The offending chemical, copper, is found in no small number of shower pipes.

Can Water Filtration Systems Help Me Have Healthier-Looking Skin? 

Yes! A combination of safe drinking water and contaminant-free showers can help support a powerful defense against all manner of unwanted ailments and effects on your skin. The most robust beauty secret in your arsenal could be providing your body with its most vital element — water — in its purest and most unpolluted form. 

AquaTru Water Purifiers

For top-tier hydration without contamination, AquaTru water purifiers remove what most filters miss — “forever chemicals” (PFOA/PFOS), microplastics, lead, chlorine, fluoride, nitrates, arsenic and more. Independently tested and certified to NSF standards to remove 84 harmful contaminants, AquaTru delivers only the most unadulterated hydration to your thirsty skin cells. AquaTru water purifiers use patented 4-Stage Ultra Reverse Osmosis® filtration that transforms your tap water into pure, delicious, clean water that you and your skin can trust. 

AquaTru Shower

Unlock your skin and hair's true potential with AquaTru's showerhead and patent-pending advanced filtration cartridge. Our advanced four-stage filtration effectively filters harsh chemicals from your shower water, reducing both chlorine and heavy metals, resulting in noticeably softer, healthier-looking hair and skin.

Proper skin health doesn't start with moisturizers and spa treatments but with clean water. Make sure you are getting nourished both inside and out. Your skin will thank you.

 

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1. https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/49300-americans-top-skin-concerns-and-how-much-theyd-spend-to-treat-them
2. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4529263/
3. https://www.jci.org/articles/view/184315
4. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26143432/
5. https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/25164-pseudomonas-infection
6. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/arsenic
7. https://www.kcl.ac.uk/archive/news/kings/newsrecords/2017/09-september/the-hard-truth-about-eczema-it%27s-something-in-the-water
8. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12692355/