Why Your Skin Is Never Just Skin

We sat down with Molly, a registered traditional Chinese medicine practitioner and acupuncturist with a Bachelor of Health Science in TCM and a Master of Women's Health Medicine, for an evening exploring Qi, digestion, hormones, and what your skin is actually trying to tell you. Molly Burton works across gut health, skin conditions, hormonal health and fertility, and her approach, treating the whole system rather than chasing individual symptoms, felt like a natural extension of how we think about skin here at FENN: nothing exists in isolation, and the most effective results come from working with the body, not just on top of it.

It was a genuinely fascinating night, and we've pulled together some of the highlights below.

They both take a whole-body approach, but naturopathy tends to look at things through a more nutrient-based, pathology-focused lens. Chinese medicine is a whole medical system that originated over 2,000 years ago, and rather than looking purely at symptoms, we look at a person from a place of pattern and imbalance. We ask a lot of questions, we use diagnostic tools like the pulse and the tongue, and we're building a picture of someone's constitution, Yin and Yang, Qi and Blood, the Shen (Spirit), and Jing (Essence). Two people can walk in with the same diagnosis on paper and leave with completely different treatment plans, because we're treating the whole person, not the label.

Always a reflection. What's happening internally shows up externally, so with any skin concern, we're doing a proper consultation to understand where it originated and how it's evolved, not just what it looks like today. Skin conditions tend to present in patterns, a Blood-Heat presentation might look like red, spotty pustules; Damp-Heat tends to be more cystic and fluid-filled; Liver Qi stagnation often shows up as jawline or hormonal acne. We look at what it looks like, then we dig into gut health and emotional state to build the full picture. It's worth saying upfront that Chinese medicine is a slow medicine. It's not going to work overnight, especially with skin, and that can be frustrating for practitioners as much as patients, but the results tend to hold, because we're addressing the driver, not just the presentation.

We look at the middle of the body as the earth element, made up of the Stomach and Spleen,  though the Spleen here has nothing to do with the Western organ of the same name, it's an energetic function, not a physical one. We're not measuring the gut microbiome directly; we're looking at how well the body is actually absorbing what we're giving it. When digestion isn't working well, we see it show up as Dampness, and Dampness shows up on the skin. It's also why we talk so much about warmth, warm water, warm food, because internally the body runs warm, and cold, raw food asks a lot of a digestive system that's already under strain. If you don't feel great after a cold smoothie, that's information. If a bowl of soup leaves you feeling more energised, that's information too.

We do it a lot in clinic, and it's genuinely one of my favourite things to practise. Cosmetic acupuncture is still constitutional acupuncture underneath — we're treating the underlying pattern, whether someone's come in for fine lines, acne, or simply wanting more vitality in their face. We'll usually start with gua sha, place points on the body as we normally would, and then move onto the face, where there are a huge number of points corresponding to different meridians. Some sit over specific muscles to create a lifting response; finer needles are used along fine lines in a threading technique to encourage collagen and elastin. Essentially, we're creating a controlled micro-trauma that draws more Qi and Blood to the area, which supports collagen and elastin production and a genuinely healthier glow, not a filtered one. For acne, we treat the root, which is very often stress and under-nourishment, and use a technique called “surround the dragon,” needling around an active spot to bring Qi and Blood to help it heal. The same technique works beautifully on scarring too, including post-inflammatory scarring and C-section scars.

It comes back to something we call Jing, or Kidney Jing, essentially our genetic makeup, given to us by our parents, and something we can't change. It governs our bones, our brain function, our fertility and hormones. What we can influence is how well we preserve and support it: through the Postnatal Qi and Jing we build across a lifetime, largely through food, sleep and how we manage stress. One of the biggest things that depletes Jing is overwork,  genuinely burning the candle at both ends without properly nourishing the body. So while the Western approach to longevity often means adding things in, the TCM approach starts by asking what's depleting you in the first place, and stopping that before anything else.

Warm water, first thing, before anything else. It sounds almost too simple, but supporting the digestive system first thing in the morning has a genuine flow-on effect to everything else, energy, skin, hormones. Beyond that: eat breakfast, ideally something protein-rich and easy to digest, and get a good team around you. Chinese medicine is accumulative rather than a single fix, so the earlier you start supporting your body properly, the less you're working to repair later.