November
2008
Why It’s So Important to Wash Those Hands - And Not Touch the Face!
You’ve probably always heard that little bit of sometimes annoying advice if you’ve ever had acne in your life. Whether it was from your parents or maybe even your dermatologist or doctor, you probably at some point heard that part of keeping an acne breakout free face was keeping your hands away from your face as much as possible. Now, with this latest little bit of research, you may want to be all that much more dilligent in your hand washing regimen.
Researchers have found that women have much more of a variety, and much more in general, of the bacteria that tend to get on the hands during the day. Why this is exactly is not known, but when they looked at these bacteria under a miscroscope as compared with male subjects hand bacteria, they found a much wider range of bacteria on women’s hands. Not only that, but on both women and men, they found that the types and amounts of bacterium on each hand could vary quite greatly, which is kind of unexpected since you’d think your hands usually have to work together and would usually have the same bacteria on them as the other hand.
It’s important to keep your hands away from your face if you have acne because bacteria is what gets into the pores and can aggravate acne, although it is the hormonal factor that actually causes the pores to enlarge and fill with sebum, which allows for the bacteria to get in and inflame the pore in the first place, so it is still in fact a hormonally based skin problem, but the bacteria actually is the part that comes in after that fact and makes itself at home in your pores, creating inflammation, and you guessed it - acne in the form of a whitehead of a blackhead which we’re all too familiar with.
It’s also important to not touch your face though for your health in general. Most people get colds and flus not because they have the virus on their hands, but because they have touched an open orifice on their face, where the virus can get into the body, such as the eyes, nose or mouth because they’ve put their hands on their face.
Just remember to wash your hands every time you go to the restroom, but also remember to wash them periodically if you’ve been touching a lot of door handles, staircase railings, or anything else that the public may be using as well. You can use Purell or some other similar hand sanitizer, but I’m more a fan of washing them since this actually gets the dirt and the bacteria off.
