Acne Magazine

Exfoliation can be a tricky thing for people with tendencies toward acne breakouts, and I, as usual, tend to overdo a good thing.  Well, I’ve been really into exfoliation lately, because my skin is aging now and I’m in my early thirties, I really wanted to focus not only on keeping my skin as clear and acne free as possible, but now I’m also staging the battle against Father Time, and to do that, one needs to exfoliate to turn over the skin cells faster and reap the benefits of fresh, new skin.

Well, you have to be a little cautious when your skin is acne prone, and of course I over did it, because I’m about to go on vacation and wanted to have fresh clean skin that was line-minimized as well.  I ended up breaking out with a new little blemish on the bridge of my nose as well as a new two blemishes on the side of my face, by my eyes, which was exactly where I was being most vigorous in my exfoliation, because that is where my crow’s feet originated and I was trying to target that area the most.

Exfoliation is good, but as I learned, you can’t be too rough with acne prone skin or do it roughly every night a couple nights consecutively, because you may actually irritate the skin or over dry it in areas and cause an acne eruption.  So, if you like to exfoliate (which I think is good, no matter what type of skin you have) you may want to opt for a more gentle exfoliater (sugar happens to make a wonderful exfoliater, and I’ve even heard baking soda works well), and also cut down on the vigorous scrubbing as well as how many times a week you do it if you’re doing it three or more times.