Skin Trust Club analysed a dataset of 1446 women aged between 27 and 47 living in the Greater London and Greater Manchester areas that used the Skin Trust Club skin health tracking service between January and March this year.

These women filled in a questionnaire on the Skintrustclub app before swabbing their skin. As part of the questionnaire, they were asked to describe their health, indicate age, list medications and generally, outline lifestyle. They were also asked to describe their skin type.

Each respondent then swabbed their skin for 60 seconds using the Skin Trust Club home test and sent the sample back to the STC sequencing labs in York, England.

Once back in the labs, each sample went through a workflow to scientifically categorise the skin type indicated by the sample.

First, each sample had its microbiome’s DNA extracted and quantified. This microbiome DNA underwent an amplification step making sure that the entire microbial population in the sample was detected.

Second, after a purification step that excluded unusable DNA fragments, each individual sample was barcoded following a technique known as indexing. This step added a unique piece of DNA to each sample, allowing the later identification of the customer’s DNA.

Third, the samples were loaded into genome sequencers for a complete 56 hour sequence to populate an informatics pipeline.

Fourth, the  informatics pipeline classified and quantified all of the microbes in the sample as raw data and metadata.

Fifth, the raw data was transferred to data servers to be analysed by specially trained Ai models. Each individual sequence was compared against thousands of other samples for patterns and trends. A detailed individual breakdown of the quantum of microflora and its implications – cause and effect – for the respondents skin was classified.

Lastly, this formed the basis of a personalised report showing the detail of each type of bacteria that made up each respondent’s microbiome and proved scientifically what type of skin the respondent had.

Skin Trust Club is a home skin test and tracking service that allows users easily and scientifically track their skin health. A simple skin swab from a user allows the Skin Trust Club genomic sequencing labs to create a personalised report on a person’s skin and deliver it via the Skin Trust Club app.

The service also makes skincare recommendations from a continuously expanding catalogue of skincare products. These recommendations are brand agnostic and are only recommended as best advice. Skin Trust Club has the expertise to provide this tracking and recommendation service because its sister company, Labskin, has been growing human skin in labs from real human cells for 15 years. This skin is grown to host the skin microbiome and to provide a testing, research and development framework for the cosmetics, skincare, medical, pharmaceutical and chemical sectors to test products in an efficient and ethical way.

Through Skin Trust Club, services that have been offered to companies, corporations and research institutes to unlock the secrets of skincare for the past 15 years are now being offered to consumers to empower them to make informed choices about the products they are using on their skin.