Acne Magazine : Skin Care, Tips, Treatment Reviews

I think I’ve discussed this unfortunate fact before (I’m partial, I’m a woman), about how teen acne tends to affect girls much more than boys, to the affect that about 85% of teen girls have some shape or form of acne and boys enjoy a much lower rate, although boys can have much more severe acne sometimes as well, but we’ll talk about it again because it’s an interesting point, and pretty much the same hormonal imbalances come into play for both young men and women who suffer from acne at this young and impressionable age.

I can remember my years of acne-riddled skin as a teen, and how much it really damaged my self esteem.  My parents tried to help me get rid of it, and we tried everything from tetracycline, which only seemed to give temporary relief, to homeopathic remedies that never seemed to work for my sometimes severe and heavily hormone driven bouts with acne.

I remember being happy if I’d go even a week with somewhat clear skin, and being able to attribute those clear weeks to certain points in my menstrual cycle, when my hormone were probably at a better balance, and I remember not having the tools necessary to go about finding a way to balance those hormones through natural treatment.

There was no internet back then, and most books or pieces of literature I read had conflicting information on what causes acne as well as the best courses of treatment for the various kinds of acne you’d be lucky enough to get.  Right now, there are some excellent natural hormonal acne treatments available that really help to clear the skin, and they’re also just good for your body in general since they help balance the crucial hormones that are responsible for your mood and acne. 

We have a new page here at AcneMagazine.com that is CHOCK FULL of excellent natural and home made (of course, wallet-friendly too usually), acne treatments that pamper the skin and make you feel like you’ve treated yourself to a nice spa visit, only in the comfort of your own home and with much less money.

There are lots of natural ingredients that have proven excellent for the skin’s tone, clarity and suppleness, and although I still highly recommend an herbal oral acne supplement as well, or even a homeopathic acne treatment on top of treating your skin topically since the root of acne occurs inside of our bodies, not outside, I think that treating yourself to these home made acne treatments is not only fun, but eye opening.

I’ve talked a lot about my earlier years and experimenting with various acne remedies that I made myself at home, but none were with the savvy that some of these recipes come with, and the knowledge about how the ingredients soften the skin without irritating acne prone skin.  Enjoy! 

It’s pretty much an agreed upon consensus that one of the biggest stressors in our individual lives, as well as in the lives of married couples and cohabitating couples, that one of the biggest problems that brings stress to the table tends to be about money, paying the bills, and other money related problems and stressors that make life a little harder. 

It’s a shame really that we have to worry about money that much, but in these economic times where people are having to sell things just to pay their mortgages, and are losing their homes left and right thanks to jacked up interest rates in the subprime lending fiasco, our skin definitely reflects the stress, and it’s almost never pretty what stress like this does to our skin, even if we are not someone that is prone to acne.  Stress manifests itself in a couple of ways on the skin’s surface. 

Some people look “tired” and as though they just haven’t gotten enough sleep.  Some people get rashes or rosacea-like bumps and redness on their face, and some people just let stress age their face, you’ve seen that, where someone looks as though they aged five years when they’ve gone through a very difficult time in their life.  Think about the presidents and how they seem to age at accelerated rates from the most stressful job in the world, the US presidency. 

Ways to combat stress on your own skin, no matter what you’re prone to is to deep breathe, be proactive and do something about the actual things that are causing the stress in your life, like maybe moonlight doing something else or get creative about ways to make additional income. 

So if you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you obviously know how much I talk about the link between stress (aka acute anxiety) and acne.  You also know that the reason that stress causes acne in us, especially those of us who may be a bit more sensitive to stress hormonally speaking, is because stress triggers certain hormones that then displace your male and female hormone activity, and in many people, leads to breaking out.

Well, this has been one heck of a week and a half for me so far. First, we had massive wind storms here in Ohio and our power was knocked out for a few days.  We lost a lot of food and felt displaced and had to stay at friend’s houses, so that naturally lead my anal retentive self to break out – albeit temporarily.  Well, the latest debacle with my overly stress-sensitive skin is this class I’m taking.  It’s Statistics.  I know, if you’ve taken this class in your life then you know what a nightmare it is for someone like myself who is not mathematically or conceptually gifted.

Naturally this class has produced a lot of angst and stress in me, and I had my first test today, where I had to go into an unfamiliar testing center and take it.  I’m also somewhat of a shy person, so that whole experience also created some stress for me, although it quickly subsided when I realized how easy it was and that I was being a loon for being stressed about such a silly thing as unfamiliarity with a testing center.

However, this morning when I was doing my last minute cramming for the test, I realized that I had totally skipped a whole concept in my studying that I needed to focus on for test preparation, and I swear I felt the conception of a new zit on my chin (my face’s favorite place to crop up new zits). 

Well, sure enough, tonight, I grew a new friend on my chin in a matter of hours.  I’m going to treat it with a little TLC and hopefully it will go down by tomorrow.  I notice lots of times now with the quick stress zits I can get them to go away quickly if the stress is short lived and my nerves return to normal in a few hours. 

I was just reading an article about my favorite sweet indulgence (me and billions of other women).  Of course I’m talking about chocolate, that thing that induces a euphoria or us women that almost nothing else can match at times.  Chocolate has long been the subject of somewhat of a myth when it comes to acne. 

Many used to think that chocolate, not just all sweets, could lead to acne breakouts. Well, it’s not true that chocolate in and of itself causes breakouts, but consuming lots of it could, not because it’s chocolate, but because chocolate bars and products have lots of another acne aggravater – sugar. 

Sugar actually aggravates any sort of inflammatory skin disease, even rosacea and acne rosacea as well.  It’s no surprise that chocolate got the unfortunate distinction since it is the sugary sweet most often preferred by most women, especially around that time of the month when we get cravings for sugars, which also happens to coincide with the time when our skin is prone to breakouts since our hormones are in a state of flux as well.

Well, now, instead of avoiding chocolate, some nutritionists are saying to indulge in your chocolate fantasies when you want to, just don’t over do it.  Doing say may actually curb further naughty cravings that are brought on by the body’s natural needs and cravings, and prevent you from totally pigging out on it if you just deny yourself the pleasure all the time.   

My sister and I took a trip to Costa Rica almost a year ago, and although it was the most beautiful scenery I had ever seen in my life, it was also the most humid weather I had ever had the opportunity to experience.  It makes sense, since Costa Rica is vastly surrounded by rain forest and has a very hot temperature to begin with. 

The only respite you would have from the scorching and drenching temperatures, depending on how far inland you were, from the hot temperatures and humid environment would be the night time, which often would cool down a bit to at least reasonable temperatures so you could enjoy youreself without sweating buckets and drenching your oil blotting papers when you swipe them across your forehead, nose and chin. 

One of the things that was an absolute necessity to look somewhat “normal” in Costa Rica was hair ties so you could tie your hair out of your face, since if you even had a lick of curliness to your hair or even natural wave, your hair would be a crazy tangled mass of frizz and curl, and also it was a necessity to have some sort of oil blotting sheets with you.

If you don’t have them and are in a humid environment or happen to be having a hormonal day where you face is secreting oil like there is no tomorrow, then you can use either a single ply of toilet paper, or a toilet seat cover, which is actually the best since it has a tissue paper-like consistency which tends to soak up the excess oil perfectly – not too much, and not too little – for whatever reason! 

What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, or so that’s how most everything in life goes if you believe fairy tales and cliches.  As far as your skin care routine and special treatments used for acne, sometimes the same thing that may be good for acne and acne scarring may also be good for aging skin.

For example, the chemical peels that are good for aging skin are also many times good for acne since they can clear the pores as well as take layers of dead skin cells off and smoothe out old acne scars and ice pick scars that are going to be smoothed out dramatically from removing the old dead skin cells that form scars in the first place.

Another good example of a treatment that is god for acne as well as aging skin (wrinkles) is microdermabrasion kits. These come in home treatments kits that massage away the dead skin cells with force.  They use small crystals of sand or of other organic materials that help to “blast” the skin and smoothe away the wrinkles as well as acne scars at the same time. 

You should be careful when using these treatments though since you can actually damage the delicate skin around the eyes if you use too much force when rubbing the crystals around the eye area.  This skin is especially delicate (hence, how easily it wrinkles and is the first to show the signs of aging on the face).

You may have heard of a bizarre disease that is being rejected by the medical establishment as a real legitimate disease called Morgellon’s disease.  It’s a very sci-fi type of disease if I do say so myself, because patients claim that they get large painful bumps (sometimes it’s a bump, sometimes it’s just a fiber coming out of the skin), with fibers or tough, hair like things growing out of them. 

They say it is also often accompanied by a sensation that there are things crawling under their skin, as if they had parasites crawling within them, just under the skin. One women I read about actually had a fiber growing out of the corner of her eye and when she plucked it out, it left a red mark. 

But the medical establishment so far is not buying it and is saying there is no medical proof that Morgellon’s is a real disease, but rather is a figment of the imagination, or psychosomatic, in other words the disease is really something else and imagined as Morgellon’s or that the patients have some other disease where they are convincing themselves that they are overrun with parasites, which is indeed an actual disease that has been studied and that there is treatment for. 

One woman’s explanation for hers was that it started as large painful, hard bumps that felt hot under the surface on her face, almost like boils or inflammatory acne that looks like boils.  She then noticed that fibers began to come out of the bumps.  Her illness was accompanied by sleeplessness, exhaustion, fevers and sweats and terrible anxiety.  Whether this is indeed a psychosomatic disease or a shared hysteria among patients remains to be seen, but there are studies going on so far that will examine whether this will be classified as a new, real disease or whether it will be dismissed. 

There are a lot of factors in the winter that influence our skin differently than during the moist, humid days of the summer and spring, enough to where we need to slightly tweak our skin care routine to make sure we don’t end up with that redness and dryness that so easily can bring on an acne explosion on our face if we’re not careful.

Although acne is largely due to an over production of sebum, excessively drying the skin actually has a counterintuitive effect by further aggravating acne and even bringing on more breakouts, so it is imperative that we protect acne prone skin from the over drying and irritation that often comes with the winter weather change.

The first suggestion is to try out a small humidifier in whatever room you spend the most time in, say your bedroom perhaps since you are in there (I hope) for at least eight hours a day. Humidifiers used to be very expensive, but you can find the smaller ones that work in a smaller area nowadays for a very reasonable cost. One tip with humidifiers though is that you have to make absolutely certain that you keep them clean since mold tend to build up in them if you don’t keep them clean.

Another tip is to stay very well hydrated. Try drinking only water, and add a little lemon juice to your water for an extra boost in hydration, as well as the skin clarity benefits of lemon water. Stay away from lots of coffee and other caffeinated beverages, since they only make you expel more water and this definitely trickles down to the skin, making the skin dry, irritated and flaky if it is under hydrated from the inside out. Consider also taking a fish oil supplement at least twice a day. They’re very reasonably priced and help keep the skin smooth, supple, and moisture-retaining.

Another winter tip for acne prone skin is to switch to a more moisturizing cleanser, perhaps some sort of natural acne treament that is gentler instead of harsh man made detergent-like soaps.  Especially if you are currently using one that is especially made for acne prone skin. Maybe switch to a creamy cleanser instead of a clear one, or if you currently use bar soap as a cleanser, you definitely want to switch to a gentler liquid cleanser, perhaps infused with vitamin c.

You want to make sure you are not washing your face with overly hot water. I know it’s great to take a nice hot shower in the winter, but it really isn’t doing your skin any favors. Hot water dried the skin out, and you may notice that after a long hot shower, your skin feels itchy and tight. Take only a warm shower, and make sure your face is getting warm water only, not hot.

Do not hesitate to use moisturizer, allover the face in the winter. If you do not currently use a moisturizer because you are afraid it will aggravate your acne, this is a big mistake. Not only will your skin look red and dry, but you will also be encouraging your skin to produce MORE sebum because it will automatically try to balance itself again to be well hydrated.

Well, I don’t know how anyone in their right mind could say that stress and anxiety does not directly cause acne breakouts when so many of us can attest to periods of time in our life, even if they’re short periods of a few days, or heck, even a couple stressful hours, actually aggravate our skin and cause zits.  I’ve had occasions where the latter happens too, where I have just a few hours of acute stress or anxiety and my skin seems to break out the very next day.

We recently had widespread power outages as a remnants of Hurricane Ike here in Ohio and we didn’t have power for three days.  Now that may not sound stressful, but when you consider the fact that it does rearrange your life and you can’t do the things you need to do for those days, it actually does end up causing a lot of internal conflict, and for me, that alone can trigger my skin to break out. I know, sucks to be me, right?

For three days we had to stay at friends houses, and then came back to a pitch black house where you couldn’t go anywhere without a flashlight and that does tend to wear on you, not to mention you don’t sleep right because there is a sense that you’re not going to get up to your  cell phone alarm so you’re not sleeping completely each night.  I also had a test to study for that I couldn’t study for because all the material is online and on my computer, which wasn’t working because first of all we had no power and second there were also outages for internet service.

We also had to eat out so I was eating junkie foods that weren’t helping the situation of my skin and the internal nourishment it should be getting.  The way you eat also affects your stress and hormone levels, which we all know directly affects our skin in a bad way (or good, but only when all is calm and in order).  Oh, a lot of our food rotted too.  We ended up having to put a lot of our food in coolers with ice and some of it still didn’t stay.  Gosh, I know I sound like I’m really complaining but in reality it made me reflect at how bad everyone in Texas has it right now and I felt grateful that we only saw what we did of this hurricane.