Are Indoor Plants Great for Your Skin?

Around midway last year I got onto the “plant mom” craze and decided I wanted to spruce my space up with a few plants. Harmless, right? Well, I definitely got a lot more than I was bargaining for. I bought two snake plants for starters, and contrary to how the name sounds, the plants are not half as scary as real-life snakes. When they first got situated in my room, I never really noticed any difference apart from a really good night’s sleep.

A precursor – my skin isn’t the best. It’s most times begging for moisture and I do deal with eczema, so we have a way to check for a difference in reaction here. We’re talking dry, flaky and sometimes patchy skin, that seems to react to medicine one day and ignore everything the next. When eczema gets really bad, that’s what doctors call a ‘flareup’, and so far only strong steroids can keep that down until my skin decides to behave again. People who have dealt with this condition can attest to how frustrating it truly is. So to buy a couple of plants during a particularly bad flareup was almost kismet.

I potted them and moved them to my room, only to notice that over the week, my dry patches got smaller and smaller, and my skin was effortlessly smooth again. I was confused, but I knew nothing had changed aside from the introduction of the plants. Some light googling told me they played a part in purifying the air around me and producing more oxygen, but I couldn’t really find anything to explain the reason why my latest flareup had disappeared so suddenly. I’ll be the first to say I’m no dermatologist and the things I’m talking about might as well be incidental, but we continue.

I carried on in a state of bliss for the next couple of months, until one day, things started to change. Being a first-time plant owner, I had zero knowledge of how to take care of indoor plants and that started to show. One of my snakeies was losing leaves – they would just soften up and fall off, one by one. I thought maybe they got some sort of infection, so I cut off any leaves that looked ‘infected’. Didn’t work. I then thought it was an issue of overwatering, still no hope, the leaves started to thin on me. In hindsight it might be that I fed my plants on mineral water… hear me out, I’m often too lazy to fetch separate tap water so why not just share what was left on my night stand with the plants? Water = life, no? In this case, no. Leaf by leaf, one of my snake plants died, and its death showed on my skin in the worst way.

Before that plant showed signs of dying, my skin did a 180 and started getting more irritated night after night. I thought, oh, maybe the plants don’t work anymore, maybe the thing that makes them tick is lost. What do I know? Then I went through the gruelling weeks of trying to keep the ka plant alive until the last three morsels of leaves were struggling to keep on. Their resilience was admirable, but the suffering had to be ended. I carried the pot outside and remained with the one healthy snake.

Guess what? Your homegirl’s skin started to flourish! My skin was essentially dying with the plant! That completely blew my mind, and if I had some way to confirm what happened to me was real, then I’d want to know how to keep the flow of healing going.

At this point I still have one snake plant alive, and while my skin is not full-on flaring, I still ebb and flow in and out of intense experience that is this auto-immune condition, but never as bad as before I got them in the first place.

atwiine@satisfashionug.com