Acne Magazine : Skin Care, Tips, Treatment Reviews

I just read an interesting article about treatments and lifestyle tips and products for preventing and treating stretch marks on the body.  Stretch marks are caused when a person gains and loses weight rapidly, such as with frequent dieting and yo-yo’ing of weight, or when a woman becomes pregnant, from her skin expanding for several months. 

Many times what happens is, although our skin is extremely strong and resillient, almost like a balloon or a rubber band, if it is stretched beyond it’s elasticity capacity for too long, it may not go back to the original color and texture it was before the trauma.  That’s what a stretch mark results from.  It often is a white color or a purplish type of color, or sometimes can be a shade of pink.  Sounds an awful lot like what can happen to our skin’s coloration after an acne lesion has been treated, huh?

Personally, I have a few and they look white to me, almost like the absense of pigment, and they clearly look like a balloon that’s been overexapanded for two long, because they have a set of lines that looks where the point the collagen gave out and the skin began to give up and give away some of it’s integrity.  These marks, in many ways, are like acne scars, in that they resulted from a trauma to the skin in that area, and they have become discolored or misshapen because of that trauma. 

For that reason, what’s good for stretch marks and often recommended by dermatologists to help get rid of them, is often the same prescription for getting rid of and fading acne scars. 

Examples of the similar treatments that can be used on both acne scars and on stretch marks for improvement are laser treatments, lotions and creams with alpha hydroxy acids in them, which smooth and buff away old skin cells to reveal fresh new, and undamaged skin, Retin-A, which is a topical cream or gel that helps to regenerate lost collagen and build up the skin to renewed integrity and strength, softening lines and indentations and also helping with  discoloration, and using peptide-type lotions and creams (like the much hyped Strivectin, which believe it or not, is actually a stretch mark cream, not a wrinkle cream).