Not really. Kava is notorious for drying out the skin - and in full cases of dermopathy it looks like alligator skin. Cutting back will help - along with hydration, lotion, getting good fats/oils in your diet and trying to drink less of the root particles with better strainers also helps. Microgind is the worst for bringing on dermo the fastest.
Can you all please tell me if any of this is possibly related to kava ?
Yup, it's that simple. Kava dermopathy is not permanent damage. In ancient Hawaiʻi people would even drink a ton of kava on purpose, and then stop and bathe in the ocean to exfoliate for more youthful skin.
If you drink enough kava you'll end up having some degree of dermo. Dry skin, reddish/irritated areas, skin flaking (head, face, torso, legs is common), wrinkles and stretch marks are all common symptoms.
The skin tears or openings can happen as demo advances. People will claim this is only a side effect of tudei but if dermo is ignored for long enough and consumption isn't stopped it will happen with noble kava too. They can be very painful and heal much slower than a typical cut would. I've had the skin tears and that's a big reason I've been lowering consumption (in addition to my skin health being much worse than it was when I was heavily consuming alcohol).
I agree with this last paragraph 110%. It is not simply dehydration - the skin lacks oils. It is not a noble vs tudei issue either - while tudei might be worse you can still get it from nothing but noble. What would be interesting to me is to know if it is directly related to kavalactones or to something else in the root that drives it. I does appear to be tied slightly drinking more of the sediment/dried root material (the worse being microgrind). For example if you drank nothing but a pure KL extract would you still get dermo?
I think it would expedite the dermo as it seems to be the case with people that consume a lot of extracts.
Sorry I should clarify - I mean 100% pure KL either extracted and purified or however they isolate KLs in a lab. The current extracts may also have what ever component that causes dermo in it as well.
I use a moisturizing serum on my face. When that dries I combine vitamin E oil with moisturizer and put it on and allow it to soak in. I use cetaphil lotion in the jar for the rest of my body. Do the face stuff twice daily. If you're having a particularly difficult time with dry skin around your eyes, cut back your use a bit and also start using a humifier in your bedroom at night before you get styes.
From the research I've seen there does seem to be a link between dermo and the KLs. I do believe that other compounds have an effect that enhances or reduces the damage to the skin. There are papers like this ( https://www.researchgate.net/publication/264314028_Kava_dermopathy_in_Fiji_an_acquired_ichthyosis ) that suggests a link to KL activity affecting certain CYP enzymes that effect lipid formation in the skin.
I wish we could get over spending so much of the limited scientific dollars spent on kava on classifications, and liver non-toxicity and maybe a bit more on understanding its one true side effect.
Hmmm. Ni-Vanuatu consume very little makas in their fresh kava but by all accounts appear to suffer dermo as much as other Pacific Islanders who drink kava reconstituted from dried powder.
Islanders don't care as much, but I'm sure as US kava consumption grows, the science will follow. The future is bright.
I believe dermopathy can be achieved with fresh or dry kava...but you will get it much quicker with dry powder, quicker yet with dry unpeeled kava and micronized kava or poorly strained kava. Fresh seems to give you a lot more leniency. Anecdotally, @Nemo used to say he'd go drink massive amounts fresh kava in Vanuatu everyday for a week or two and be fine...but if he ever decided to find a bag of dry powder when he was back home, the dermo would kick in fast. Others have made similar claims. Also, when you search online about kava dermopathy, Fiji seems to be the most referenced place for the condition and google images brings up images of Fijians with extreme dermopathy. Plus, as you know, there are several Kani Kani creams marketed in Fiji, but not elsewhere in the pacific as far as I'm aware, which at least suggests a higher frequency or severity of dermo there. -- Because of the kava forum discussions, the US might surpass Fiji in dermopathy references, but that would make sense since we are also drinking dry powder and drinking regularly. None of this is the evidence I'd really like though, I really want to see a twin-study where Twin "A" drinks drinks 8 Tbsp kava everyday for X amount of time, Twin "B" drinks the equivalent amount of fresh kava for the same duration. Both are drinking the same cultivar, from the same farm, with the same ratio of waka:lawena. Variations on the same test would be great too...waka vs. lawena, heady vs. heavy, peeled vs unpeeled, tudei vs high DHM noble.
That would be the logical result but in the US herbs are very under-studied. The entities who have the ability to fund research into medicinal plants lack the incentive to do so. Now I know kava isn't completely medicinal but that is the best path for research as "recreational" plants are typically considered "drugs". The few recent exceptions are cannabis, which has an illegal status federally while 2/3 of the states have medical programs for it and K@ which as we know is a target for a potential federal ban while being researched for it's medicinal/anti-opioid addiction properties.
Great commentary! Somewhere on these Forums we posted a paper which suggests Cinnamic acid as a "skin-drying" factor.I believe dermopathy can be achieved with fresh or dry kava...but you will get it much quicker with dry powder, quicker yet with dry unpeeled kava and micronized kava or poorly strained kava. Fresh seems to give you a lot more leniency. Anecdotally, @Nemo used to say he'd go drink massive amounts fresh kava in Vanuatu everyday for a week or two and be fine...but if he ever decided to find a bag of dry powder when he was back home, the dermo would kick in fast. Others have made similar claims. Also, when you search online about kava dermopathy, Fiji seems to be the most referenced place for the condition and google images brings up images of Fijians with extreme dermopathy. Plus, as you know, there are several Kani Kani creams marketed in Fiji, but not elsewhere in the pacific as far as I'm aware, which at least suggests a higher frequency or severity of dermo there. -- Because of the kava forum discussions, the US might surpass Fiji in dermopathy references, but that would make sense since we are also drinking dry powder and drinking regularly. None of this is the evidence I'd really like though, I really want to see a twin-study where Twin "A" drinks drinks 8 Tbsp kava everyday for X amount of time, Twin "B" drinks the equivalent amount of fresh kava for the same duration. Both are drinking the same cultivar, from the same farm, with the same ratio of waka:lawena. Variations on the same test would be great too...waka vs. lawena, heady vs. heavy, peeled vs unpeeled, tudei vs high DHM noble.
@Kavacurious! Hands seem to show it the quickest, I used to think the hands got it worse from being submerged in the kava water when preparing the beverage, but I don't really think the whole hand gets submerged when I knead kava...just the fingers really. Anyway I've been drinking a lot of kava for many years and my hands are the only things I'd say looked aged or more wrinkly. I get dermopathy all over my body sometimes which has annoying prickly and itchy dry skin sensation associated with it, when that calms down then skin starts showing it's little dry lizard skin pattern and starts coming off like dusty dandruff. Sometimes certain areas get a kind of satin shimmer or sheen, that's usually the whitest sections of skin, like from my waist to my knees. When I get it really bad, sometimes I get dry patches on my face, but not too bad and I personally don't notice my face getting more wrinkly from it. Dermo left unchecked and un-lotioned can start making more raw rashy sections, beyond that of the dry, prickly skin...for me it usually happens under the armpits.
Anyway, I'm not sure the wrinkliness and kava-dermopathy are exactly the same. My wrinkle hands seem to persist whether or not I feel like I have dermopathy. With the exception of that, when I'm at the end of a major full body dermo...when the top layer of skin is all dried up and dying and it's barely clinging on...it can make the skin so thin and dry that even smooth baby-skin on the underside of my forearm can looks like it has fine wrinkles if I move it the right way. But it goes back to normal after skin falls off.
Another tid-bit..I recently got my friend into kava and he had only been drinking for about two weeks when he told me his hands were looking aged and dry. He showed me and sure enough, his palms looked weather beaten and the tops looked more wrinkled. He was also getting dry spots near his eyes and mouth...that was a really fast onset.
