pciccone who created the Daz exporter for Luxrender wrotte this on the lux forum 1 week ago.

''- Skin material. We have debated the use/faking of SSS but I'm actually thinking of skin material like the other basic materials, glossy, glass etc. The reason is simple, faking it is a lot of work and it's not always working out of the box. The human skin is partially glossy but with a shine that is unique. A skin shader would make life a lot easier and lead to more realistic results.''

this is the answer that he got.

A "true" skin material would require a multilayer BSSRDF (bidirectional surface scattering reflectance distribution) which it a bit involved to introduce. I've seen a couple of approaches in pbrt which typically ends up being implemented as a special case integrator with various preprocess steps. I doubt your users are interested in making the various layers of *dermis maps etc that is needed "Ordinary" SSS doesn't work very well for skin either, it usually just makes the models seem like wax or plastic. So perhaps a variant of your "hack" (matte translucent + glossy) combined with a asperity scattering BRDF would be a better approach for this (asperity: see for example http://bit.ly/c0axBU)

I would like to add that your users' use of the "simple hack" brings pretty amazing results already!

EDIT: I'm implementing the "The Secret of Velvety Skin" BRDF (paper linked above) in lux just to see how it looks and if its worth having

http://www.luxrender.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=27&t=4487&hilit=fireflies

is this a joke or what?