Acne Magazine : Skin Care, Tips, Treatment Reviews

There is a famous woman who is very skinny. I won’t mention her name, but she is a very beautiful, rich and powerful woman. She is extremely, sometimes painfully thin, and I believe that she really tries at it, perhaps even resorting to diet pills or drinking caffeine or simply deprivation to achieve that level of thinness. No one is that thin without trying, and because of her previous more shapely body, I believe that her extreme thinness is due to her dieting habits.

She also happens to have skin that can look bad at times. I’ve known women like this actually, which is why I think that dieting pills and drinking copious amounts of coffee or other caffeinated drinks to stave off hunger, which is what a lot of avid, extreme dieters do, I’ve seen it in action, contribute greatly to making your skin look bad. It can also contribute to the appearance and severity of rosacea.

Many times people who resort to these sorts of dieting methods look somewhat dehydrated, which makes them look more sunken, and can age the face. Also, they may have small bumps allover their face, because caffeine and stimulants cause a rough texture to appear on the face, I’ve seen that in action on myself over and over when I’m starting to need caffeine to get me through my day, so I can personally attest to the roughness factor.

I actually also had an aquaintence a while ago who had gorgeous, olive toned skin thanks to her heritage. She also happened to drink almost a whole pot of coffee every single day, and this made her skin look rough. While overall, she still had avoided a lot of the signs of aging thanks to her genetics, she still had that roughness that was telltale on her cheeks, forehead and chin, that was probably a direct result of both dieting and drinking tons of coffee to keep herself thin.

So, if you’re dieting, or you are interested in staying thin or at a healthy and comfortable weight for your self, it’s probably a good idea to try to do it without the help of too many stimulants and caffeinated products. After all, you’re sort of defeating the purpose of looking better if you’re poisoning your skin in order to stay skinny.

It seems sort of ludicrous to worry about self tanning when there is snow on the ground. At the moment I’m writing this, there is over a foot of snow on the ground where I live in the Cleveland/Akron area of Ohio. Oh yes, we get plenty of snow, and we have long, cold winters, but this winter hasn’t been too cold or too much snow for that matter. We just suddenly got walloped out of the blue with the white fluffy stuff, and it seems like it might continue for a few days, so it’s only natural that I start doing my daydreaming about the summer right around now.

More specifically, what I’m tired of in the winter is how drab my complexion looks. I don’t really bother as much with the self tanners for my face, and I certainly never expose my skin to a tanning bed on my face, so I would only ever self tan, but somehow in the winter this escapes me. I forget what a nice, healthy glow this can add to your complexion, so I’m starting to put it on my face about once a week at night after I’ve exfoliated and washed.

Just a light little layer is enough to add that glow and warmth to the skin, and also it’s a great camouflage for skin imperfection. I love putting it on because it makes the skin seem more luminous and young, and it hides my fine lines as well. I get more compliments on my complexion when I have a self tanner on my face.

I also make sure that I apply the self tanner to my neck and behind my neck, as well as behind my ears, so that there is complete coverage, and no dead giveaway line that shows my secret that it’s a self tanner and not just a naturally great healthy glow. You can use self tanners in the winter, just make sure they are non pore clogging so that you maintain clear, clean pores to reduce incidents of breakouts on your face.

I have no problems with my self tanner that I’m using now, which happens to be the spray one by Neutrogena. It’s totally noncomedogenic and it works great at giving you that natural glow. I apply it with a makeup application pad to make the blending easier, and to ensure I don’t need to wash my hands afterwards to get the brown off.

There are a lot of people who suffer not only acne on their face, which is bad enough, and I have to say, the worst place to have acne in my opinion, but I’m biased because that’s where I’ve always had the worst problem with my acne before, but they also have acne pretty badly on their body.

It may be on their back or chest usually , the two most common areas besides the face to have acne because of where and how many oil glands there are in these areas and how they react and collect dust, sweat an oil.

There are some products though, that are made especially for body acne that help to gently cleanse the pores and keep further acne breakouts from occurring.

Many of these products are body washes, which I think is the best way, rather than using a soap lathering bar, to deeply penetrate and lather adequately to clear away all debris and oil that causes body acne, as well as to effectively deposit acne fighting ingredients such as salicylic acid and benzoyl peroxide deep into the skin so that you won’t suffer too many acne breakouts in the future.

Body acne can be incredibly embarrassing, especially in the summer when we tend to strip down to the bare minimum for clothing and things like racer back tank tops and bikinis become more of the norm for clothing.

Not only that, but a lot of people with severe body acne complain that sometimes it may even prevent them from getting intimate with someone for fear their body acne will be discovered. Now, I know this is a pretty severe case, but anything that causes that severe of duress needs to be addressed. Luckily, body acne is treatable, and often times it just takes the right practices and the right products to get results in clearing this embarrassing acne away.

I’m always on the lookout for new ingredients that can give my skin that natural luminescence that makes you look so young, fresh and energetic. I think that’s what we’re all looking for, after all, isn’t it!? There are a number of ingredients which help to keep the skin looking fresh and young, probably one of the more notable ones for helping you look bright and luminous is vitamin C in a very concentrated form.

However, there are other ingredients that will also infuse your skin with that coveted natural dewiness that usually are an indicator of youth and vibrance, but of course, they are also an indicator of a healthy body and healthy skin, so eating right is vital if you want your skin to look it’s very best from the inside out. See a great skin care vitamin here for more info on that.

Well, one of the other ingredients that I like in my skin care products is kind of a weird one to find in skin care, but Aveeno has been using them quite abundantly in their skin care line, and they’re very popular because they’re very mild and anti allergen, and they also happen to make your skin look very good. They also have a high SPF in them, 15 to 30 depending on the product, which is awesome because many day creams don’t offer sun protection, and they also tend to irritate the skin if they do.

Soy is a great ingredient to help blend the skin tone better and bring out the natural glow because of it’s naturally polishing and antioxidant values. With continued use, it can really make a difference in the texture and tone of your skin and give it that all around natural glow you’re looking for as well. Another good thing is that soy skin care products usually aren’t outrageously expensive because soy is such an easily made ingredient, and it is grown right here in the US with manufacturers having easy access to it, so it’s cheap to make.

I know we’ve talked a TON about how diet affects your complexion on this blog, and there is a good reason for that – diet really does have a huge impact on your complexion. But that does not mean that you are forced to live a life where you can never enjoy another sugar, fatty, deep fat fried, or chocolaty delicious morsel again. No, it really doesn’t. The trick is to not do it all the time, and just not to over do it when you decide you do want to indulge in some of the more “no” foods for your complexion.

For example, I indulge in chocolate about once a week .Sure, sometimes I go a little nuts and over do it and end up sugar bombing out, but I know how bad I feel and how my skin reacts when I do that, so I’ve really cut those chocolate and sugar pig outs down to a minimum now.

I remember when I was younger, I could probably have easily downed a whole quart of chocolate ice cream, but now that I’m a little older, my sweet tooth and my overeating gene have kind of taken a back seat to common sense.

Valentines Day is a huge chocolate time for me. My husband knows that all I want for V Day is chocolate. I tell him not even to bother with anything else. No, I don’t even want a fancy dinner and a bottle of wine or flowers, I really just want some of the best chocolate I can get my hands on, something really decadent, like chocolate covered strawberries or pretzels, or turtles from one of my favorite chocolatiers around here, Malleys chocolates.

As long as I get some chocolate to pig out on, it’s all good from there on V Day. What do you think – are you guys gonna get some chocolate from your special one on V Day?

Using herbs to treat acne is nothing new. In fact, in Chinese medicine, herbs and herbal acne remedies have been used for years as a means to help calm the inner turmoil in the body to help the acne heal and also to stop new acne lesions from forming.

Acne is, after all, a form of inflammation and irritation, and Chinese medicine practice is to treat what they term as “internal heat” by using a “cooling” herb or natural remedy to counter the internal heat caused by raging hormones, free radicals that are roaming rampant, destroying healthy skin cells and taking precedent over the good skin cells.

And then there are also other potential deficiencies in the body, such as zinc deficiencies or other vitamin or mineral deficiencies that have been determined to be a possible reason or contributing factor to the continuation and formation of acne vulgaris.

Herbal acne remedies are usually seeked out by those that have either already tried traditional “medical” acne treatments like tetracylcine or a variety of other antibiotics (which I personally am against, being on long term antibiotics is not good for the body), Accutane, erythromycin, Retin-A and other topical acne treatments as well as medications taken orally, or they don’t want to go down the medical road, and would like to try to holistically (naturally) treat their acne with herbal acne remedies instead.

Whatever your reasons may be for searching for alternative methods to treating your acne without traditional medications or straining visits to the dermatologist, you should know that there are some excellent alternatives that qualify as “herbal remedies” in that they use a base of plant-derived nutrients and therapeutic herbs in their formulas as a means to target the causes of acne internally.

As a teenager, the internet was not really available, so I didn’t have the resources to do the right research and find a good herbal acne remedy, so I was relinquished to going to the dermatologists office over and over again after nothing worked correctly and got rid of the acne for me. My parents wasted hundreds of dollars.

I was first prescribed an antibiotic called Tetracylcine, and that made my skin extremely photosensitive (sensitive and susceptible to sunlight and sunburn), and it also would render a birth control pill ineffective.

There are also long term consequences to taking antibiotics for a long time. There has been much speculation that taking antibiotics long term may even promote breast cancer later on in life, among other health issues it is suspect in having a part of.

I was also prescribed numerous topical remedies, including Retin-A, which just dried my skin out so bad it would chafe and bleed in the winter. I still didn’t have clear skin.

Now, with the offerings of superios products in the realm of herbal acne supplements, like the one we discuss here nonstop, which I used successfully for a course of six months a while ago, and have had minimal issues with my (now) adult acne since, young people and older people with acne have some serious alternatives that work for getting rid of acne. It’s just a matter of finding what works for you.

With this recession, mine and my husband’s pay has dried up quite a bit. Not only are our jobs paying less now and giving us less of a raise, but we both have sidelines that rely on sales of goods to consumers, and a lot of that income, as a given, has really dried up as well. It’s not disastrous, but we’ve definitely had to tighten the household purse straps if you know what I mean.

One of the areas that I’ve found I’ve become quite good at tightening is spending on extraneous items like skin care products, beauty products, and even toiletries, because I’ve found that you can get coupons for a lot of drugstore skin care acne products and also you can get a lot of coupons online now for the higher end spa quality stuff as well because they are hurting too, and want to entice people to buy their products.

Some of the recent coupons I’ve been able to use are for the Aveeno facial lotions that contain sunscreen. These babies normally go for sixteen bucks a pop, and now I can find $2 and $3 coupons for them online by searching various coupon sites. I’m also on a mailing list so I get notified when new coupons are available. This is also a great way to do your grocery shopping and save money on foods and other grocery items.

It might not make a huge dent, but hey, here and there, saving five to ten dollars really does make a difference in your household spending, and if you add those savings up over a year, you have quite impressive compilations of savings that you can feel good about – and if the coupons are out there, why not?

I’m writing about this fun phenomena, because I just experienced it last night, and am now seeing the result of this funny little pain that occurs on my face when I can feel a pimple forming on it. I swear, when I feel those cortisol (stress) hormones elevate in my body, my heart rate accelerate and my breathing become shallow when I’m under a lot of stress, I can almost feel a new hormonally fueled pimple forming under my skin.

That’s exactly what happened to me yesterday when I was totally stressed out about these wedding reception invitations we had to send out. I was getting hit from all angles, with people calling me to add on new invitees, my husband (we got married a few short months ago, we’re having a reception later, it’s kind of out of order, I know!), not knowing if he got everyone and unable to provide me with the addresses I needed, and trying to figure out how many more I needed to print out, because yes, we saved tons of money by printing them ourselves, but let me tell you, that was a lot of additional work!

So, as I was feeling my heart rate go up and my breath get short, I could also feel a slight throbbing on my chin, right under the left side of my bottom lip. I swear, I could feel a zit forming on my chin! And sure enough, within a few hours, I felt there and had a hard bump, but it was still too far under the surface to show any color, it was just a bump. Then, when I woke up this morning, of course it must have come to the surface enough and it was reddish in color, and misshapen, a bump in other words, or a swollen area, but more localized than it was last night.

I’m sure that if you’ve been struggling with acne for a while, as I have, you have experienced this. Cortisol, which is the hormone that is released in abundance by our bodies when we are under a lot of stress or are in sticky situations, is actually a huge hormone disrupter. It can cause your androgens, which are the male hormones in your body, to go haywire, which in turn lends itself to acne. In fact, hormone imbalance is a huge reason for acne prone skin.

But that’s not all cortisol is responsible, or at least partially responsible for. It has also been linked to obesity, so it is best to keep cortisol levels under as tight control as possible for your life, which means you need to minimize stress levels. In the end, it’s good for your weight and good for your skin.

So, I understand that the birth control pill, or at least some variations of it with lower and more even dosed hormones supposedly, is supposed to help keep my hormones in check and help clear my skin up. One of them, the Yasmine pill, is even advertised as a pill that helps to clear the skin up. I know that I have had relative success over the years in using birth control pills to help keep my skin clear, but they are not an effective catch all, and you can still break out while on the pill. The one I’m on now, which is a low, even dose pill, I think helps somewhat to keep my skin clear, however I noticed a really interesting trend.

The pill I’m on is called Alesse, by the way. I’ve noticed that on my “off week” where I am taking only the placebo sugar pills, which I actually don’t take, because I have a good memory and go right back on them after my week off is up, my skin actually becomes extremely clear, like not a dot of acne or a slight bit of bumpiness in sight.

I thought it was odd that my skin would clear so exceptionally on my days off the pill, since this should be when my own hormones would take over, and if there were to be a breakout, you’d think it would be around this time, but no, my skin actually gets better when I’m off of it for this short time.

If anyone reading is a doctor or has a medical background and can answer this question for our readers, some of whom I’m sure have noticed the same thing I have, it would be greatly appreciated! It’s interesting to navigate through the little nuances of acne and why it happens, and how our bodies and our hormones especially, work so that we can work with what we have and get the clearest skin possible in the most natural way possible, and if we understood the mechanics behind it, it would make clearing our skin all that much easier, and of course getting rid of those pesky hormonal acne breakouts earlier on!