Hello all my awesome Acnemagazine readers!  I wanted to wish you all a very Happy New Year!  Hopefully like me, you don’t plan on doing much but lounging around and watching movies all day.  That’s the way to spend New Years day I say!

Seriously though, I wanted to say how much I appreciate each and every one of my readers, and how without you, I’d feel alone in this world with the ways I feel about having great skin, and all the years I struggled in my teens with having acne ranging from severe to moderate.

I feel like this blog has given me a voice, and allowed me to share my own experiences and viewpoints, screw ups and victories in my battle to get clear, beautiful skin over these years. After all, acne does not simply stop when you are an adult when you have very oily skin naturally!

I also wanted to make an announcement that we’ve added a brand new page to AcneMag about blackheads and how best to get rid of them without causing too much skin trauma.  It’s called Remedies for Blackheads. I discuss what I’ve found over the years to be the most effective and least damaging ways to get rid of blackheads.

Blackheads are something that everyone considers hard to get rid of, as evidenced by the thousands of internet searches done on “getting rid of blackheads” and other various searches regarding blackheads which show people are obviously looking for ways to remove them.

Again, all readers I want to wish you all a VERY HAPPY NEW YEAR. May this next year bring you and your family peace, prosperity and unbounded happiness

I’ve always felt, myself, that when I’m going through those periods of zen, when I’m most at peace with myself and my lot in life, that so happens to also coincide with the times when my skin is its most clear and radiant.

When I’m calm and happy and content, that’s when my skin really glows. My skin is also calm, not red or ruddy, or irritated, or acne prone. That’s because when you are experiencing that “zen” zone, you are also experiencing a superior hormonal state of balance.

Think about it. As a woman myself, I can say that the times when I feel most insecure and most anxious about everything is times when I also tend to be irritable, such as during PMS.  This is also the time that my body just feels tightly wound, and my stomach has more issues.

Everything just seems out of whack, and my hormones are the primary reason that I can’t really focus and feel like I might cry at the drop of a  hat. Well, acne, and even acne rosacea, are hormonally based skin issues.  They are conditions that are DIRECTLY related to the balance of your hormones.

When your hormonal balance is out of hand, usually you experience more female hormones surging if you’re a guy, and more male hormones, or androgens, if you are a woman. These two clash with eachother, and they cause the skin to erupt, just like how you are feeling inside “like you are going to erupt”.

This is why many feel that things that relax them, like massages, yoga, and other activities that they find peaceful and enjoyable, help their skin to look radiant and unflawed.  When you are in the zone, and you are feeling comfortable and happy with everything in your life, that is when all is right with the world.

If you are a person who is naturally tightly wound, I suggest you find ways to really culminate relaxation and peace in your life.  Some people find this in kickboxing and other really agressive sports, while others find more peaceful sports like yoga and tai chi to be more complementary to their state of mind.

Whatever the case is for you, make sure that you try to cultivate this sort of peace and balance in your own life. It’s only then that your true beauty shines – from the inside out.

One of the unique “home remedy” types of suggestions I have heard has to do with reducing the characteristic redness that goes with acne lesions, especially when they are large and painful, and also especially when they have prematurely been opened, whether by accident, or they were intentionally popped by the person to relieve the pressure.

Either way, the redness is what makes an acne bump look so terrible. Without the color, sure, it would still be an unsightly lump on the skin, but at least it would not also set itself apart from your healthy, clear skin by flashing a red sign “I’m here, I’m here, look at meeee”.

If you are struck with a particularly ugly, red zit and you have no other recourse to get rid of it quickly, one “home remedy” you may want to try is to put a little drop or two of the eye relief liquid Visine, or some such similar product.

Why would Visine be used to reduce redness of a zit? Well, Visine is actually a blood vessel restrictor. This is why it helps to reduce redness in your eyes. When you have irritated capillaries, this product’s duty is to help constrict those back down and reduce their red appearance.

When you irritate your zit by popping it or by otherwise traumatizing the area, or it just gets so big that the pressure is too great for the skin to bare without getting red, try putting a little bit of this on the affected area.

What’s the worst that could happen? You may irritate it a little with the salt that typically is in these eye formulas, but the ingredients in it which help to reduce redness will counteract any additional redness from the irritation, setting them off of one another.

We talked last time about how your blood sugar levels affect your skin and can trigger acne breakouts and perpetuate the unfortunate predisposition toward acne in your skin.  Remember, your blood sugar levels control a lot more than just hunger and mental and physical performance.

They also control the levels of female and male hormones in your body. Remember also that excess androgens (male hormones) in the body are what lead to acne lesions because of their ability to force the body into excess production of oil, or sebum, which traps bacteria beneath the surface of the skin and inflames the pores.

A high sugar, high carb diet is, in itself, a naturally “inflammatory” diet. This means that it actually pushes the body to not heal as well.  This is part of the reason why diabetic people have a hard time healing wounds.

Avoid refined starches and grains like white bread, white pasta, chips, crackers and other foods which use refined white flour as their basis.  Also avoid sugary sweets like chocolate, candy and cookies.  Choose foods that keep you full for hours. 

You will know when your blood sugar is all whacked out because you’ll feel it in your mental performance and the way your body reacts. For me, I know that my blood sugar is either too low or too high because I can’t seem to focus, I get moody and my motor skills seem to be “off”. 

Some people experience seeing auras or bright lights in front of their eyes when their blood sugar goes into dangerously high or low ranges.  When your blood sugar is even, you will know it because you feel like your body and your mind are humming along like the finely tuned machine they are. 

Remember that even if a food isn’t “sugar” when you eat it, like the obvious culprits candy, cookies, cake and the like, it can convert to sugar rapidly in the body.  Breads, cereals, potatoes, white rice and corn are examples. 

However, it doesn’t mean you have to live a carb free life to maintain clear skin. You can eat carbs, just make sure they are as whole as possible. Only consume WHOLE GRAIN carbs.  Never eat white pasta, white bread or other refined ones, always make sure they are whole.

Lean protein is best for maintaining stable blood sugar levels.  Try to stick to hormone free white meats like chicken, pork, and turkey. Fish is excellent for your skin because it contains omega 3 fats, which are in themselves a great blood sugar regulator.

I know I’ve written on this topic many times, but I just can’t express how much anxiety and stress can add to the likelihood of your skin breaking out.  For some people, the correlation between anxiety and acne may be a little less conspicuous, but for others, like myself, it is an obvious and undeniable relationship.

The funny thing is, that as I get older and my skin matures, my breakouts as related to stress and anxiety have changed a bit. The breakouts seem to migrate to different areas of my body over the years. In my teens and twenties, whenever I was experiencing a lot of anxiety about something, my face used to always be the location of choice for my skin to express itself.

Now, the manifestation of acne due to stress and anxiety seems to be either on my tummy or my back of all places.  Very strange, but this development just recently occurred. I, like many others, have been going through an extremely stressful time at work because my employer is not replacing people that leave and therefore, the people that are left are picking up a lot of the slack.

It’s a difficult and frustrating period where I, a self professed perfectionist, do not have the adequate time I feel I need to thoroughly address people’s needs and questions at work, not the proper time to put in to my own workload.  This frustration has definitely impacted my skin.

The first day of high stress, rapid heartbeat and shallowness of breath, I came home to find that my tummy had broken out in red, irritated bumps that resembled acne, but may have also been a rash.  I treated it with topical acne cream and it seemed to help, so I believe it was a cortisol hormone triggered breakout.

I also felt a large acne pustule coming out on the side of my forehead. That one luckily went away pretty quickly, but was painful in its formation.

I then noticed that the breakout that first appeared on my tummy seemed to have migrated to my back.  I only noticed this because when I applied lotion, it burned, and I put my hand back there and felt bumps all over.

It is critical to contain your anxiety and stress by doing things that you know help you through those difficult periods.  This way, you can also minimize your hormonal acne breakouts.

This is a continuation of our story (ok, rant) about the vital importance of wearing sunscreen on your face in the winter. Picking up where we left off…

Well that’s because reflection really does make it more concentrated and damaging.  My rule of thumb is just to make a it a habit to apply sunscreen – of course the noncomedogenic kind – every day, whether it’s winter or summer.

I may choose slightly different types between the seasons since I usually like a thicker and more emollient one in the winter dryness, but nonetheless, I ALWAYS have a lotion with sunscreen on as my base in the winter, just like I do in the summer.

It’s the only way to totally protect your face against UV damage, which ultimately damages the skin and leads to earlier photo aging. It also can aggravate acne by drying out the skin and forcing the skin to produce more sebum, which in turn leads to more breakouts.

It seems counter intuitive since sun lamps used to be used as a treatment for acne, and the sun’s rays can be therapeutic to a point, but burning the skin will almost always cause a breakout, or at the very least cause your skin to become temporarily more oily and difficult to handle.

I remember one time I got my face really burned in the winter. It was a situation where I was younger, I went skiing with my family and was totally unaware of the skin problems I’d have in the future (this was well before my acne-laden teen years, when I was blissfully ignorant of how your skin can ruin your life when you’re younger).

We were on a snowy mountain top, and I didn’t like to wear hats all that much and I also wasn’t wearing any sunscreen, nor was I wearing sunglasses or anything else that could have protected my face against the powerful UV rays that were bouncing off of the crisp white snow.

It was a bitterly cold day there on that mountain top, and very blustery. I remember getting the most painful combination of sun and wind burn ever on my face. My face was so dry and fried that next day that I felt like if I smiled my face would surely crack.

This is just one lesson as to the damage you can unknowingly do when you think your skin is safe from UV damage in the winter. Like I said, just make it a habit to NEVER go without a lotion with a sunscreen in it as your base and you’re be just fine.

Many of us tend to forget, even though we’ve been told about it before, that we still have to be vigilant in putting sunscreen on our exposed body parts (namely our face) in the winter, just like we do in the summer.

Somehow though, it never really sinks in and we may end up with a combination sun/wind burn on our faces if we go skiing or partake in some other similar outdoor sport in the winter.

This is especially true of the bright, sunny winter days when there is still a lot of snow on the ground.  We just had a day like that today where I live. It looked like it should be 50 degrees outside because it was so bright and sunny, and yet it was only 25 degrees outside.

Yup, the snow was as frosty and crunchy as ever, frozen into a veritable tundra or ice to walk on, yet, the sun still shown like it does in the tropics. I think we all have a mental barrier about that, and I’m not excluding myself.

I thought for sure before I set foot outside that it would be warm and balmy, sure enough it wasn’t.  What we really forget is that the bright sun and bright white snow is especially dangerous for us to burn our precious facial skin and put it through trauma and damage, on top of what damage it has suffered from our acne.

Now, add a high elevation, such as when you are skiing on top of a snowcapped mountain, and you’ve got levels of UV rays that are just as high as they would be on a sunny beach in California!

The truth is, most of us are bundled to a T when we are out in these types of elements, so the majority of our bodies are covered. However, one of the most important parts is often neglected – the face.

Your poor face takes a beating between the environmental polluters and toxins it comes into contact with every day since it is not covered with clothes, and the potentially damaging rays of the sun.

The white snow acts as a reflectant, intensifying  the UV rays and effectively bouncing them back up off the ground, and on to your face at an intense rate.

Remember the movie Something About Mary? Remember Magda, the leather faced old lady who used a reflective piece of foil like board to get her face tanner?

Since this is too long and is going to be broken into a two parter, be sure to bookmark us and come back for part 2 – and in the meantime, wear your sunscreen on your face all winter!

Getting a good night’s rest is a well known way to feel energized, help to avoid getting those cold and flu bugs that go around, and generally extending your longevity, since sleep is connected to how long people live.  However, I don’t think anyone really gave the old time saying “get your beauty rest” any real credence.

Now, it seems that a new study is actually proving that getting your eight hours of rest every night really does in fact make you look much more attractive and appealing to other people.  A study that was commissioned recently had volunteers take pictures who had respectively gotten too little sleep and the right amount of sleep.

Generally the “right amount” of sleep can vary slightly between individuals, just as other bodily preferences do, but most people thrive on eight hours per night. This eight hour mark has been around for a long time because it consistently is proven that this is how people function best and feel their best.

The volunteers who got eight hours of sleep the night before actually got much more positive feedback on the attractiveness of their pictures, while the sleep-less group got more negative feedback. Some of this type of feeback included how “healthy” they looked and overall how “attractive” they looked in these pictures.

The study pretty much overwhelmingly proved that other people prefer to look at people who have been well rested. Generally, one’s skin looks ten times better after a good night’s sleep than it does if they have been sleep deprived.

The skin relies on sleep just like any other bodily organ does. When it is deprived of this nightly rejuvenation, it takes on a slackened look, has less tone and good color, and generally may be more prone to breakouts as well.

Sleep should really be one of the hallmarks of a good complexion because of the power it holds over making your skin look better, but also because it makes your overall facial appearance more attractive.

Your eyes are wider and more alert, which is more attractive, your skin tone is better, and you have a very healthy and vibrant “aura” to your skin when you’re well rested and feeling good and energized.

Night time is really a time of rejuvenation for the skin. Your body temperature elevates at night, and forces much needed oxygenated blood to the face, which helps to repair it and soothe it, and to prepare it for the next day of being bombarded with environmental toxins.

It’s pretty much a well established understanding the tanning in indoor tanning beds can be very hazardous to your health. But I’m not all together against it, because I think that with the right amount of going tanning, and for therapeutic benefit to get UVB light and therefore vitamin D, especially in the winter, it can serve a purpose. But the absolute rule of course is that you don’t over do it, exposing yourself several days a week, and you don’t EVER get burnt, because this is where the real genetic damage and sun damage comes in, which can lead to skin cancers.

The problem is, many teens are still going tanning, and way too much. Not to mention, in the beds that mostly put out UVA light, which does not help your body produce vitamin D, but only serves to damage skin and get you really tan.  Estimates say that nearly one in nine teens go tanning often, and that’s really not good.

First of all, teens skin is still very smooth and supple, and they also do not use the same restraint that a lot of adults would use since adults are usually a little more worried about their health, while teens are still primarily focused on what something will do for their cosmetic appearance. And shoot, trust me, I’m including myself in that generalization. I didn’t care whether I’d get skin cancer ten, twenty years down the line when I was a teen, all I cared about was getting tan and looking good.

I burned myself repeatedly in tanning beds – and the real sun – in order to get that coveted tan look, even though my skin is very pale since I’m of Irish descent. Not a good thing, and teens that don’t have skin that is meant to tan are doing this all the time in hopes of looking more attractive.

Like I said, I do believe that some indoor tanning may serve a purpose, especially in UVB beds, to enhance vitamin D production, especially in the winter time for those that live in areas where there is no sun in the winter, but indoor tanning can be dangerous when it’s abused.

I normally don’t write too much about skin issues other than acne, but this experience really made me think about how important it is to keep at least your face out of the direct sunlight as much as possible as you age.  My skin seems to be especially susceptible to photo damage (which is damage caused by the sun, such as age spots, liver spots, and fine lines and wrinkles and generally uneven pigmentation and tone). 

This is probably mostly due to my genetics. You see, I’m all European. I’m part Irish – fifty percent to be exact – and my father is German and Austrian and some other European stuff, but basically I”m pretty pale skinned, and the sun really doesn’t “tan” me very well, intead I get burnt easily.

I’ve recently learned that it’s important not to stay out of the sun entirely because you can make yourself vitamin D deficient, so I really don’t think it’s a good idea to avoid the sun like a vampire would. That’s just too extreme, and you are depriving yourself of the best way for your body to attain and absorb the most readily bio-available form of vitamin D there is.

Vitamin D is absolutely crucial to your well being, as it is being discovered. It is essential to help ward off cancer from forming and also essential for a properly functioning immune system, among other things.  However, your face is actually one of the worst areas of your body for vitamin D absorption from the sun.

For some reason, when you get sun on your face, it’s been discovered that this sun exposure does not provide very much vitamin D at all, so lather up the SPF on the face as much as you can, because it will get sun damaged if you don’t.  I was out in the real, full on sun for about two hours when I was visiting California recently. 

I actually had my SPF on, an SPF 15 lotion as well as a layer of foundation with an SPF of 8 in it, and I still emerged from the sun soaking with a ton of new freckles. I also noticed that two of the small age spots on the side of my face that I’m always trying to get rid of were noticeably darker, so there went all my efforts to get rid of them via at home microdermabrasion and chemical peels.

The bottom line is, keep your face as protected as you can from the sun. This experience demonstrated to me the extreme damage that the sun can do to the skin on your face if you’re not diligent in protecting it.