Feed: Acne Magazine : Skin Care, Tips, Treatment Reviews - AggScore: 74.9

I’m an avid user of oil blotting sheets. This is not only because I believe that a shiny, slick looking face just isn’t all that attractive (have you ever seen a picture where your face literally looks like it’s glistening?), but also because I believe that it helps keep my skin’s acne-producing abilities to a minimum. Why? Well, because you’re essentially mopping up all that surface oil that is the “trap” which baits in dirt and bacteria. This, in turn, causes inflammation of the skin’s pores, and thus, in turn, this causes either blackheads or whiteheads, which we all know are a headache to deal with, and can linger for days or weeks, marring our complexion.

You can buy oil blotting sheets for a really reasonable price almost anywhere now, whereas they used to be somewhat hard to find in stores. I’ve found my most recent batch for a buck (yes, a dollar!) at Target by that cheap makeup brand called ELF (Eyes Face Lips). I love their oil blotting sheets because they come in a compact little recyclable sort of carton that fits easily in your purse pockets and takes up the space of a few credit cards maybe. They work great, there’s not much technology that goes into making blotting sheets, so don’t spend a ton of money on them.

Heck, in a bind, you can even use a single ply of toilet paper, or you can also use a piece of a toilet seat cover, which works like a charm as well. Usually, for me, since my skin is still very oily at the age of 35 years old (yes, dealing with wrinkles and acne is no fun at this age, trust me), I have to blot for the first time at around ten o’clock AM.

If I miss that, then my skin becomes a veritable grease pit. I can literally take my nail and scrape my face, and get a combination of oil and foundation under my nails. It’s that greasy! So, if you have very oily skin, you may want to start carrying blotters around with you to minimize that surface oil and keep your skin looking matte and fresh all day. It’s really worth the small investment, and it may even help prevent some of your acne from forming in the first place. I’d just go to Target and pick up a cheap pack, or your local drugstore and see what they have and start trying them out, I guarantee you’ll get addicted to them after a little while!

You’ve probably heard the fact reported that adult acne has been on the rise over the past few years. So, what could be the reason? It can’t simply be that we’re all under the same increasing amounts of pressure over the every day dealings of life in general, or some sort of a mass shift in genetics, could it? Not really, but there are probably several contributing factors to the increase in both adult acne, and teen acne.

One of the reasons that has been looked at, but never really proven one way or another, and keep in mind that the reasons in general can be additive in nature, especially since we consume tons of soybean oil every day in processed foods that we don’t even know about, and this has been known to mess up the hormonal balance by adding too much phony estrogen into our bodies and throwing off the hormone balance that’s supposed to be there. Meat though, unless it is bought from a butcher that does not add artificial hormones and antibiotics, usually is treated with some sort of hormones.

This is because adding hormones to a chicken or a cow’s diet actually increases their growth and meat, and makes them ready to slaughter earlier than the animals that don’t get the hormones. In other words, it’s a cheap and dirty trick the meat companies use to help them turn profits faster and make their chicken, beef, or whatever other meat they are packing, grow into marketable pieces of meat much faster.

However, those hormones aren’t without their negative human interactions, some think. It’s been considered that the addition of hormones to a lot of our meats has actually contributed to several things, among them potentially the increases in adolescent and adult acne, increases in breast cancers and even prostate and other hormonally charged cancers, and a variety of other health problems and other basically harmless but nonetheless annoying issues.

What you might want to try, just to be safe, if you are a carnivore and not a vegetarian, is to start buying the hormone free meats. There are usually hormone free options now even at grocery stores that you can buy. They cost a little more, sure, but honestly they taste worlds better than the other stuff with the hormones and antibiotics in them. After all, every little bit of healthy living choices makes a difference in your overall health and well being, so it might not just benefit your complexion, but also your overall health and longevity.

Well, the countdown is on to my wedding to my fiance of a few months, in Las Vegas, and it’s only another week until we leave! I’m really excited, but I am starting to get nervous about “being on stage” and also getting everything in order before the trip. Whenever there’s a lot to think about, you can almost count on me breaking out in some large zit that inevitably won’t go away for at least a week, so I’ve been preparing my skin to equalize and my hormones to stay calm for about a month now by taking the dermacleanse capsules and also by using a tea tree oil astringent every single night to make sure that every trace of makeup, bacteria and any other acne causing stuff is gone.

I’m also making sure I blot the oil off my face several times a day at work, as my skin seems too ooze oil there for some reason, and since oil collecting on the surface of the face causes acne, at least it makes me feel like I’m doing something else preventive to keep those nasty zits at bay. When I start to feel my breath get rapid and shallow, I know that I’m panicking and getting nervous, so I have been good about “talking myself down” and calming myself so that I can make sure all those hormones that cause acne don’t get stirred up, and my cortisol (stress) hormones aren’t stirred up, which cause problems for your other hormones getting stirred up.

SO far, knock on wood, I have not gotten any major breakouts or zits for my wedding, and I’m hoping that it stays that way. I’ve found that by internally and externally limiting my stress triggers and then managing them properly when they do happen, as well as doing the surface treatment to my skin it needs to stay clean and oil free, yet not dried out and irritated, I’ve averted a potential wedding photo disaster. Wish me luck! I’ll let you know how it goes once I’m back from Vegas. At least the air there is dry, and I won’t have too much excess oil production or sweat!

Well, I had heard about this Grandpa’s brand pine tar soap for a while, and how unique it was, and that it was different because it was so natural, so I figured I’d finally give it a try. Grandpa’s pine tar soap is definitely a bargain at anywhere from three to five bucks a bar, depending on where you look, and it’s been around since the early 1900’s, so it’s a brand that enough people like that they have kept it around by faithfully purchasing it for a while, which is a good sign that the stuff is good for something!

One consistent thing I kept reading about this unique, pine tar infused soap, was that it had a “unique” smell. Well, it is definitely unique, and it really is kind of repulsive to me to be honest. It smells like burning rubber, that’s the best way I can describe it, and the scent is very strong, I can smell it in the shower actually when I get in. The color of the soap might catch you off guard too, it’s a very dark brown color. Here are the ingredients in this soap : palm oil, coconut oil, purified water, pine tar oil, and vegetable glycerin. That’s it, there’s nothing unnatural in this stuff, which earns it huge points in this day and age where there seem to be tons of chemicals in a lot of our toiletries.

Even though the soap is dark brown, it does lather a white color, and it has more lather than you’d expect for a soap that does not contain sodium laurel sulfate, the ultimate lathering chemical that is added to most soaps and shampoos. It can not only be used as a skin soap, but some people even use it for shampooing their hair, and it’s supposed to be excellent for those with psoriasis and dandruff.

When I cleansed my face with this, it lathered very well, and left my face extremely clean – actually squeaky clean, which did worry me a bit since usually that indicates that your skin has been too dried out by a product you are cleansing with. However, I found that as long as I put a lot of my night time moisturizer on, my skin did not dry out using this product. It has not made me break out yet, so that’s good, and I like the fact that it is all natural, so I’ve added this for now to my night time cleansing routine because I don’t want to use it in the morning also for fear of drying too much.

One word of caution. For some reason, this soap makes my eyes sting, so make sure you rinse your eyes well if any of the soap gets in them.

Aging of the skin has always been a fascinating area of study, and now that good skin is totally “in”, and has been a hallmark of the ultimate mark of beauty for quite a few years now, it’s being studied more and and more not only in terms of how to treat common and marring skin conditions such as acne and rosacea, but also in terms of how to turn back the clock on aging skin and help prevent it from happening in the first place.

I thought the study that was performed on twins and how their skin aged differently, even though they were identical and from the same DNA, was an interesting case in point about how we can actually control the rate at which our skin ages and what it looks like, much more than we probably thought we could. After all, it’s not just good genes that get you skin that doesn’t age as quickly or ages more gracefully, but it in large part has to do with ……drum roll please……YOUR LIFESTYLE.

Yes, this has been hammered home here at Acnemag for years, but it’s a point nonetheless that shouldn’t be taken lightly if you take the appearance of your skin seriously, and you want to keep it looking great for as long as you possibly can. The studies involved several sets of identical twins. The most interesting one was a set of female twins that were bicoastal. One lives in Ohio, the other in Florida, and the differences in their skin’s appearance is quite remarkable.

The one that lives in Florida actually had more sun exposure over the years than her twin, which right there, puts her in a higher risk of aging skin to a larger degree and more photodamage, which creates sunspots and other telltale signs of aging on the skin. Not only that, the Florida twin has been a smoker for several years.

Smoking accelerates aging of the skin because it is a toxin, it cuts off oxygen to the skin, and therefore not only is a grey pallor eventually visible on smoker’s skin, but also their collagen production suffers because of a chain reaction of events related to the inhalation of the toxin over and over, and their cells go rigid much quicker, which means that wrinkles appear much more easily than when collagen is present, and makes the skin more flexible and smoother.

Another interesting point made by the study was that people, once past the age of forty, who have more body fat, tend to look younger longer because their fat fills out the wrinkles in their face, making it appear more supple, while more lean body types tended to look older due to the lack of facial fat. However, when younger than forty or so, the opposite apparently holds true, and those that are leaner actually look younger than their biological age. Food for thought!

So, I’m going to go out on a limb and try something very different from what I’ve tried in the past for my facial cleansing. I’m going to try a bar soap that is 100% natural, which means no chemicals, no acids, nothing. I’m a little concerned that an all natural soap just won’t get my skin as clean as a soap that maybe has a little something unnatural in it, but time will tell. I’ve actually ordered several to try. They are organic soaps that have no lathering agents, chemical scents or any other common chemicals in them like parabens or anything.

I have tried an all natural pure glycerin soap on my face before, but it actually made me break out, because I just don’t think it was cleansing out the impurities like a regular soap or liquid cleanser could have done, which would have seeped down into the pores and gotten that dirt and bacteria out, which we all know is what leads to blemishes on the skin. Someone with totally normal, great skin may have the luxury of using soaps that are all natural without problems, but thus far I have not. We’ll see once I try these on my face, I’ll let you know.

I really more so bought them for my body instead of my face. They’re fine on the body (unless you’re treating body acne, in which case I do recommend something with salicylic acid, my favorite, or benzoyl peroxide if you must), because they are gentle and the rest of your body generally doesn’t need that deep down clean that your face does when you have acne problems.

I’m already successfully using a lemon glycerin soap on my body, which works great because it doesn’t dry out my skin like some other soaps do, but I already had to to stop using it on my chest because I noticed some small zits popping up there (I have an oily chest area too, quite common for those of us women with acne), so I switched back to using the same face wash I use on my face there and it cleared up pretty quickly.

All of this is in my current obsession with going natural on as many things as I possibly can. It started with me going natural on my shampoo, which was hard to do since it’s really hard to find a great natural shampoo that doesn’t leave your hair looking like a rats nest, and from there, it’s been onto body lotions and other natural experiments. Oh, and how could I forget the most important natural product I’ve always used – deodorant!

Still can’t make the leap with toothpaste though, I gotta have my whiteners in that!

It seems like one of the top requests for the skin is to have smaller pores, which is why so many products focus on shrinking and tightening and clearing the pores, so that you can have one solid, smooth mask of skin on your face with no intermittent “interruptions” in the form of big black pores on there, disrupting the illusion of perfection. There are lots of things that can help with the appearance of larger pores, however, it’s unfortunately a truth that we have to generally live with enlarged pores as they are hard to actually shrink down, especially if we have oilier skin.

In fact, let’s answer that question about why the pores are larger on the facial skin than anywhere else on the body. Well, the answer is very simple. We have waaaay more oil glands on our face than we do on other areas of the body in general. Sure, some of us are a little more active, speaking of sebum production, however, in general, most people tend to have more oily skin on their face, which means the pores enlarge to let that oil come to the surface.

That’s why acne sufferers generally have a harder time with large pores, they have oilier skin, which provides for larger pores, and the oilier the skin, the larger they appear. However, you can help to camouflage large pores, which especially occur near the nose, with a great foundation. You can also help shrink the pores by using a great astringent, which helps to temporarily shrink the pores so that they aren’t so obvious.

I like to use a green tea or tea tree oil astringent, as they really help to close up the pores after you’ve washed your face. Another trick of course, is to splash the face with ice cold water after washing it in warm water, to help to shrink or close the pores. This also acts as a barrier against invading bacteria into the pores which can cause the pores to become infected and to start an acne postule at the surface, which we all don’t want.

There are some professional spa treatments that can help to shrink the pores, but these are also usually temporary. You may want to stay away from pore strips that rip the gook out of pores, as they can leave you with open, iflamed, and potentially infected pores, which look ten times worse than just a normal blackhead.

Isn’t it kind of weird to think that if the bacteria that normally lands on our skin on a daily basis, just from exposure to the elements alone, were to escape off the surface of our skin like it normally should if we didn’t have over active sebaceous glands that trapped it in oil that is on the surface of the skin, we wouldn’t have to worry about acne? That’s why acne and oily skin go hand in hand, one wouldn’t exist without the other, and vice versa. So, you have to attack acne one of two ways, or both together.

You have to either treat the underlying problem, if you would, which is the overproduction of oil on the surface of the skin by the oil glands, which is done by drugs such as accutane. You can also get hormone controlling natural supplements for acne, like Zenmed caplets which work wonders for me personally when I’m having a flare up, which help to control the production of sebum, which comes from the sebaceous glands. You can also attack the bacteria on the surface of the skin, so there is not any bacteria that escapes to the depths of your skin.

This type of approach is achieved with topical cleansers and gels that kill bacteria, but it can also be achieved by topical treatments such as blue light therapy, which helps to control surface bacteria.

Or you can take a two pronged approach, which is probably the best way, and attack acne two fold by addressing the bacterial problem by using only high quality products that are also gentle on the top of your skin (cleansers, gels, creams, lotions, etc.), and you can also use something internal like a natural supplement for acne control or a dermatologist prescribed medication, although I personally warn people away from antibiotics because of their potential long term effects on your body and your probiotics in your intestines.

For women, there has also been a suggested potential link between long term antibiotic use and breast cancer, and I personally believe there are better ways to internally treat acne anyways. Diet is important, yes, but there are also ways that you can help regulate your hormones through supplementation and lifestyle.

Well, I’ve really screwed up my skin in one spot on my chin, and just weeks before I’m getting married, no less! Of course, this is just my luck, but I’m hoping that it’s going to be fixed by then by applying a host of intensive moisturizers and natural healers for the next several days. Here’s what I did, the genius that I am. I had a pretty bad acne lesion about 3 weeks ago. It popped up thanks to stress about the wedding and a host of other issues that were causing me stress that I couldn’t seem to contain like I normally can now.

This large acne lesion not only was a sore sight on my face for a few days, but after it popped, it was a bright red spot that was very difficult to cover with any sort of cover up or concealer stick that I have, including my great technique of stippling it with a high coverage foundation that usually works. Like I said, this all transpired a few weeks ago, so I was actually left with a red spot that wouldn’t go away. Well, I figured, I’d give myself an acne scar treatment that usually works, every weekend until one week before the wedding.

Needless to say, I got too overzealous. I ended up scrubbing the you know what out of just that one spot. Well, I ended up literally rubbing the skin off, and then I combined that with my peel and now I have a blotch about the size of a dime on my chin where a tiny red scar used to be, so now it looks a world worse because I was so determined to get rid of it.

First off, I used way too much elbow grease, and second, I shouldn’t have then added the peel solution to it after I felt it burning, that should have been a sign to stop, but noooo, I thought I would be little miss smarty pants and outsmart my acne scar. Well, now I have a scaly, rubbed raw, red blotch on my face that hurt, and it feels like every time I smile, it’s going to crack, no matter how much I moisturize it.

It’s basically like a giant cold sore. It’s already peeling off in sheets, which is in turn making it look more red and raw. Arghhh! If only this could have happened even weeks ago, I would have assuredly gotten rid of it by the time we get married, which is 11/7, but now I’m not so sure. I’ll keep you posted on what works, just in case any of you inadvertently make this dunderhead mistake like I did

If you have had acne for a good part of your life, or you have suffered with the skin condition on and off since your teens, like myself, then you know how much of a Godsend a good concealer can be, and a great foundation for that matter too. A good concealer can really camouflage the redness, bumps, scabs and scars that are leftover from when an acne lesion goes away, or even when it’s still there, so that you don’t have a giant shiner standing out for all to see.

There’s definitely an art to applying it correctly, but once you learn that, you know how important the product itself that you choose is extremely important in the results you get in covering up your blemishes as well. I’m going to tell you why I think these duo cream concealers are really a good idea to have around. First off, they are great because our skin tone is usually not exactly the same all the time.

You usually will see a bit of a change in your facial skin tone from the winter time until the spring and summer time, especially if you get sun exposure on your face, which most of us do to some point, even if we religiously apply the sun screen every day. This can cause subtle or extreme changes in the tone of our complexion from season to season, and having a lighter and a darker shade of cream concealer really helps to bridge that gap.

Not only that, you can even blend the two together for a “custom” shade if your skin happens to be between skin tones at times. Shoot, I can tell you honestly, that even during those winter months where my skin literally doesn’t see a lick of sunshine, my skin can still vary subtly in shade from day to day, so having two different tones to work with is really great.

Especially since it looks so much more natural when it is more closely matched to your real skin tone. That makes all the difference in how well it camouflages your blemishes and other imperfections. A little tip though, if you must do anything, go a shade lighter with concealers, as darker is almost never a good idea and will actually make blemishes and imperfections stand out MORE than they usually do if you’re not careful.

I love the cream, thicker concealers, because I believe they are superior to the liquid ones, which I’ve always found offer inferior coverage and longevity to the cream types. I think everyone, not just acne sufferers, but especially acne prone skin should have these duo concealer kits.