Tia Zakher, a 22-year-old woman known on TikTok for a skin care routine that involves doing nothing to her skin — not even washing it — would like you to know she is fine.
And that, as of five days ago, she has started using water to clean her face, she said on Friday during a video call.
That she had to specify both of those things underscores the unusual nature of social media, where soon after she posted videos about her routine, rumors began swirling that there was something seriously wrong with her skin, or that her skin care journey was fake. It also highlights, yet again, the tension that arises when health care and social media collide.
On March 14, after years of trying different skin care approaches to heal her acne — from topicals and peels to microneedling and exfoliation — Ms. Zakher decided to stop doing anything whatsoever: stop touching her face, stop picking at any scabs or dead skin and also stop washing it. She did not post about that decision to her followers (a group that has swelled to more than 125,000 in recent weeks). It was only in April, when her skin started showing visible changes — discoloration, a buildup of flaky skin and a scaly texture — that her followers asked what was going on.
She responded with a video that now has more than 10 million views. In the video, she said the changes in her appearance were just her skin’s way of healing naturally. She called it the “caveman” routine, though she clarified in the video call that she did not invent the term and that she had seen it elsewhere when researching skin care routines.
At first, “people were just intrigued and I got so many more comments, so I responded again and then that video took off,” she said. “But it was never something where I wanted to sit down and share this with people. It’s just, you know, how the internet works.”
Then the questions, and the trolling, began. Some commenters were disgusted, others speculated that she had a fungal infection. Some theorized that she was faking the whole thing by using a clay mask just to garner attention.
“When you have somebody who’s spreading a lot of information about health that is potentially dangerous, whether what she’s doing is real or not is not the issue,” Dr. Zachary Rubin, an allergist in Chicago who posted a video on TikTok in response to Ms. Zakher, said in a phone interview. He noted that not cleaning your face could potentially lead to infections. “It’s that you might have somebody who is vulnerable to skin issues who might take that advice and end up having more problems.”
“My personal view on this is that she’s trying to promote some type of lifestyle that involves medical advice that’s highly inappropriate,” he added. “You see this all the time with people saying ‘drink raw milk’ or ‘don’t take vaccines.’”
Ms. Zakher said she had told other TikTok users to seek out a dermatologist’s advice. She also turned to her own dermatologist, who commented on her TikTok videos saying that Ms. Zakher did not have an infection or a condition to worry about. Her mother, Samah Kamel, jumped into the comments as well, adding that Ms. Zakher had been “medically advised by a very good doctor.”
Still, the internet became so invested in what was happening to Ms. Zakher’s face that TikTok creators and commenters started to pick apart every video. When she shared one about participating in a half marathon last week, in rainy conditions, online sleuths pounced on tiny changes in her skin as clues that she had been lying. Some contended that her skin color had changed in the rain, thus proving it was just clay.
The level of questioning got to a point where Ms. Zakher said close friends and family reached out to her and her parents to check in on them.
“I know that my situation is very rare and unique and a lot of people struggle with understanding that — but I can take it, I have thick skin,” she said, with the pun fully intended.
To Ms. Zakher, what is more concerning is the dermatologists who have tried to diagnose her from afar or jumped in with their opinions. “That’s a bit worrying to me,” she said.
Brynne Clippard, one of the many social media users drawn into the mystery around Ms. Zakher’s skin, did her own online sleuthing. She found a Reddit post by Ms. Zakher from a year ago in which her skin looked the same as it does today, which she thought added credence to this being a real condition.
If she were lying, Ms. Clippard said in a phone interview, “I would give her props for playing the longest game ever.”
Ms. Zakher confirmed in her video call that a year ago she had tried the same routine, and that it had led to the same reaction. But two weeks into that previous attempt, she could not resist the urge to exfoliate it all off, she said.
“I couldn’t take the texture — it felt like something was wrong,” she said. “I gave up too soon.”
This time around, she has committed to a few months, or for as long as it takes for the build up on her skin to fall off naturally. That, she claimed, would be a sign that her skin had healed itself.
And, for the record, during the video interview, she touched her skin, rubbed it and then held her finger up to the camera. There was no clay visible.
