This is a difficult question to answer.
Given that skin is now viewed as an ecosystem, perhaps a useful way to phrase the question would be: What is the perfect ecosystem?
A healthy ecosystem should be well-suited to survive in its area’s conditions.
Each environment imposes its own restrictions on the life that can grow there, providing different levels of water, nutrients, light, etc.
So the perfect ecosystem in hot, dry conditions would look completely different to one in cooler, wet conditions. A healthy rainforest would contain thousands of different species, all suited to taking advantage of high levels of rainfall and the accompanying humidity, while a desert ecosystem would contain species that can survive the relative lack of available water and high temperatures.
Whatever the conditions, a healthy ecosystem should be filled with species that are well-adapted enough to efficiently utilise all of the available resources in a way that ensures the long-term stability of the ecology.
As we have established, one common metric for measuring the health of an ecosystem is diversity.
Diversity provides an ecosystem with adaptability and resilience. In a diverse ecology, all the available niches are filled, leaving little to no resources available for exploitation. All the species are adapted to fill their niches perfectly, making it difficult for outsiders to replace them.
The same principles apply to a “perfect” skin ecology – the organisms present are perfectly adapted to match the conditions within the skin site that they occupy, and there are enough co-evolved species present to provide long-term stability and resilience, leaving no ecological niches open to invaders.
So we need diversity, but only within the group co-evolved of microbes that are adapted to live on skin.
Esse mimics the conditions for which our skins have evolved and in this way favours a diverse, healthy skin microbiome.
Esse believes in using biotechnology to rewild and rebalance the skin microbiome.