The following answer has been selected and edited by New Scientist staffIt sounds like advertising hype to me. Your "normal" flora don't need any extra nutrition if your skin is in a generally healthy condition. Each distinct zone of healthy skin has its own stable, dominant flora and meddling with it is risky.The ideal flora for each zone form an even, adherent coating of a particular combination of strains that perform all sorts of different functions, such as tuning your personal and family varieties of body odour. It also crowds out or repels rival strains that might threaten your health. Over large areas of skin your normal beneficial flora form what amounts to a protective non-stick coating.Growing too vigorously does no good because overcrowding might cause them either to harm your skin or flake off, leaving footholds for alien pathogens. Furthermore, in microbial ecology one of the most important competitive weapons is the denial of food to rivals. Leukocytes in pus, for example, inhibit germs partly by absorbing iron, and therefore denying it to invasive bacteria and fungi. If your shower gel supplies excess nutrients to your skin, that surplus might fuel an alien invasion.Jon Richfield, Somerset West, South Africa

Such a product may be a sign, though, that soap manufacturers may be starting to acknowledge that 'anti-bacteria' and 'super-clean' is a wrong-headed way to think about hygiene. Probably soap itself needs to be rethought, about the only appropriate place for soap is on the hands for food prep purposes etc. Mostly soap just strips the beneficial oils and bacteria that the skin has evolved over millenia to culture on its own.I recently tried an experiment to stop using soap and shampoo for these reasons. Using only a scrub cloth, lots of warm water, and conditioner on the hair, skin needs less moisturizer and the hair actually gets much less oily between showers. The skin can mostly take of itself. And no, I haven't gotten any odd comments or upturned noses.

I previously sent in this answer – Skin flora, microorganisms living on the stratum corneum – outer shedding layer of skin, most are bacteria, some fungi and certain protozoa. The body’s natural flora help in preventing infection by occupying sites favorable to growth, such are high in available nutrients, where they prevent invading organisms from getting a foot-hold in these environments by over-competing with them, thus crowding-out invading pathogens. Not only do these flora prevent infection, but they also mop-up chemicals, breaking them down into harmless products, protecting the skin of irritation. Although with long term antibiotic use, excessive washing or breaking the skin can result in infection.In convergence with ‘Jon Richfield’; stimulating skin flora may be hazardous in contradiction with the product advertisement, allowing large numbers of organisms to amass and prove a problem for the body such as blocking pores, and favoring those strains that divide faster when nurturance are in excess. I understand that organisms other than skin flora might not benefit from this, due to other chemicals which inhibit their growth or kill them, and a product which is non-detrimental to the beneficial organisms would be just as effective. Martin Dodds

There's a lot of good sense been posted as comments to this question, so I will restrain myself to commenting that simply using soap f any kind is a good way of stimulating your skin's microflora. Every time you wash using a detergent, you strip off most of the surface layer of dead skin, and with it most of the bacteria and fungi that live naturally in and on this layer - meaning there is fresh territory to colonise. In fact, skin that hasn't been washed a while generally has a lower bacterial count than recently-washed skin. So I'm with our conditioner-only friend on this one....