When I was a young man and battling acne there weren’t a lot of books on the subject and there weren’t a lot of options for acne treatment either. But everyone, and I do mean everyone, had an opinion on what caused my acne and how I should handle it.
For some, I exercised too much, for others it was too little. Then there were the people in the personal hygiene brigade. They felt I needed to wash or shower more, or use different soaps, or even, use no soap at all.
My favorite of all was from my dad. He thought that oats were God’s true miracle drug so he would instruct me to soak a cupful of oats in a quart of water over night and drink the water the next day. Then, and only then he would say, would my acne go away.
Well, as modern science has proven (and a lot of personal trial-and-error), none of those approaches work. That’s because what causes acne breakouts isn’t our exercise level, or our personal hygiene, or even what we eat. What causes acne is our own body chemistry, buried in our skin.
You see imbedded in our skin are sebaceous oil glands whose job it is to lubricate our hair and skin. Also living in our skin are many, many dead skin cells that are discarded as we grow new skin every day. Ordinarily they don’t cause us any problems but when we create too much oil or too many skin cells, or both, they mix together like an oily plaster and form a clog. These clogs attract more oil and more skin cells and the clog grows. Sometimes it grows into a whitehead. Sometimes it grows into a blackhead. And sometimes it becomes inflamed or even infected and it grows into a painful cyst.
What determines if this happens or not isn’t controlled by how much we scrub or how much oatmeal we eat. It’s mostly just a simple matter of hormones. They start raging when we hit our teen years and that causes our oil glands to go into overdrive and our skin to grow at an accelerated pace. The result is acne.
Now if we’re diligent and patient, we can successfully battle acne. We need to use acne products that help soak up the excess oil and clean away the excess skin cells. If our acne is too strong for over-the-counter acne products, we can try prescriptions which can shrink the sebaceous glands and reduce their oil output. And we can even try acne laser treatments which attempt to do mostly the same thing (as well as fight bacteria).
So the next time you hear from some “well-informed” friend that your acne will dry up if you just stop drinking orange juice or some other such nonsense, just smile and nod your head. Because now you know what causes acne breakouts and, armed with that knowledge, you can win your acne battle.