San Francisco Teen Creates a Free App to Calculate Skin Risk Based on Location

India Poetzscher has quantified the environmental risks to the largest organ in the human body. That’s no small feat for a senior attending University High School in San Francisco.

The 17-year-old created the Skin Chem app, which gives users a risk score based on their location. This number helps show how environmental conditions, such as sun exposure and air pollution, threaten skin health.

“A lot of people are becoming more aware about UV and how that affects your skin, but there are all these other chemicals that I don’t think they’re as aware of,” she said.

Beyond the UV index, Poetzscher wanted to highlight air pollution and other factors that affect skin health. The app includes a calculator feature that takes into account cigarette smoking, car traffic and daily sunscreen use.

“I decided to make an app because I feel like it’s very accessible in today’s society,” Poetzscher said.

She has long been interested in skin care. As she learned about chemistry, she noticed certain beauty products have toxic compounds. She then began doing her own research, leading her to pursue an independent study class at school. Thus, the Skin Chem app was born. It won the 2022 Congressional App Challenge for California’s 12th District.

Dr. Divya Seth, a procedural dermatology fellow at UCSF’s Dermatologic Surgery and Laser Center, said Skin Chem is promising in how it draws on environmental data to give people a snapshot of their risk on a particular day. During her medical training, she studied how the environment affects our skin, and in doing that work, she looked for similar tools. Nothing came close to Skin Chem, she said.

“Although there are some different tools out there related to other types of environmental exposures, they don’t really come together in a way that directly allows you to figure out how they impact your skin specifically,” Seth said. “I think this app is unique in that it brings together that environmental data.”

When asked about potential improvements to the app, Seth said while she sees the app as a great first step, she would like to see the technology give people actionable prompts. Right now, users get a risk score and are asked to take precautions — but the app doesn’t tell people to wear sunscreen or put on a hat. “As we think about how UV exposure leads to skin cancer, or how the particulate matter index can lead to different inflammatory skin conditions, I think having those next steps could be really important,” she said.

While Poetzscher’s project initially began from an interest in personal skin care, the stakes for skin health could be getting higher as the climate crisis intensifies. A report by the American Meteorological Society found that climate change drove unprecedented heat waves, floods and droughts in recent years.

This summer, extreme heat has been making headlines in places like Phoenix, where record-breaking temperatures of more than 110 degrees lasted over a month. The hot weather spread into California, as well, with triple-digit temperatures seen in parts of the Bay and in the Central Valley.

Institutions like UCSF are exploring the relationship between skin health and the climate. According to a 2021 UCSF study, during the 2018 Camp Fire, which choked the Bay Area in wildfire smoke, health clinics in San Francisco saw an increase in the number of patient visits for eczema. The findings suggest that short-term exposure to hazardous air can be damaging to skin health.

According to Seth, other U.S. research has shown that as pollutants or exposure to different factories in your area increases, there’s an increased risk of different inflammatory skin conditions. Lately, she has been looking into neighborhood disparities. Where you live may determine your propensity to certain skin conditions.

“One thing that I think is powerful about this app is looking at those hyperlocal conditions and understanding how those can change just based on built environment factors,” said Sadie Wilson, senior resilience manager at Greenbelt Alliance, a Bay Area nonprofit climate advocacy organization.

This hyperlocal attention — seen in the location-based approach of the Skin Chem app — is key to combating the larger threats emerging from the climate crisis.

“While we think about climate change, usually in global emissions, all of them are adding up to have these huge shifts in our climate, we don’t often talk about how that results in really local conditions,” Wilson said.

This local focus is showing up in the Greenbelt Alliance’s work with the summer launch of its Resilience Hotspots Initiative, which identifies several climate-vulnerable communities — North Richmond shoreline, Suisun City, Newark, southwest Santa Rosa and Gilroy — and how they could benefit from nature-based solutions, or using the natural environment as resilience solutions.

“Not just understanding a tree for its aesthetic purposes, but really understanding how that plays a role in stormwater capture and heat reduction in air purification,” Wilson said.

The initiative’s work in Gilroy and Santa Rosa is geared toward partnerships with local organizations to help respond to heat and wildfire risks while keeping equity in mind. In parts of Santa Rosa and other agriculture-based communities, predominantly Latino farmworker communities face the brunt of working outside in extreme heat.

Wilson said education is a big part of the gap that needs to be filled to help communities of color especially become resilient to climate impacts.

“Organizing and getting involved locally are some of the best ways to make change,” she said.

For Poetzscher, who is part of a new climate-conscious generation, it’s the spirit of outreach that could promote hope in the face of our planet’s biggest crisis.

“I learned so much during this project,” she said. “There’s still a lot of work to be done in terms of spreading awareness about this issue. But I think it’s better than before and it’s improving.”

KQED’s Brian Watt interviewed India Poetzscher. Listen to the audio here.