Newsletter
Skin in the (Mental Health) Game2026-02-02
“Happiness is the best makeup.”
—Drew Barrymore
Your outside appearance is a reflection of your past lifestyle, current internal peace or turmoil, and future goals. It is a way to attract mates, as well as signal health, wealth and status.
Assessing somebody’s grooming (cleanliness, flamboyance, appropriateness to the environment) is a surpassingly informative marker for experienced clinicians with good pattern recognition skills, and now easily trainable into AI. We have developed a simple questionnaire for that, and have now over a decade of data that can be analyzed for diagnostic purposes.
Less appreciated is the impact mental health has on overall appearance in general, and skin in particular. Stress, anxiety, depression, psychosis, alcoholism can all disrupt and degrade the health and esthetics of the skin. Makeup and cosmetic procedures can cover that up, but why not glow from inside? Getting your mental health “house” in order promotes a radiance that is observable and conveys its own evolutionary signals. We encourage people to get tested and optimized, for example through MindX Sciences (https://mindxsciences.com/bloodtests/).
Live. Happier. Longer.
Alexander B. Niculescu, MD, PhD
Founder + CEO| MindX Sciences
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