What Are The Causes Of Acne?

Most people will experience the reality of acne at some time in their life.Only the lucky minority will avoid it as their transition through adolescence gains pace.  It is not a lot of fun to suffer from acne, making it one of the most bothersome parts of growing up.Knowing the initial causes of acne will help you in your efforts to defeat it.

What causes acne?

The first step to understanding the root cause of acne is to understand how the skin on your face is structured.  Your skin has millions of pores, tiny openings in the surface of your skin; many of these pores also have tiny hairs growing up through them as well.At the base of these pores are the small oil producing sebaceous glands. The name of the oil they produce is sebum.

In normal, non-acne skin, the sebum produced helps to keep your skin smooth, moisturized, and healthy.  It is produced by the glands and works its way up through the pore onto the surface of the skin.Sebum is a multi-tasking oil, it helps in keeping your skin moist and also clean, by aiding in the removal of bacteria and dead skin cells.You can’t stop your skin getting dirty, but it is comforting to know that nature has provided a ready made solution.

Unfortunately, disruption to this natural process inevitably leads to acne.This happens when the body has to learn to deal with an increase in hormone production, adolescence for example.  During this learning process, though, fluctuations in hormone and other levels can cause imbalances that lead to all sorts of situations including the development of acne.

How acne actually forms

When your body produces extra hormones, it causes the sebaceous glands under the skin to produce much more sebum than before.Also, these hormones can make it so much more difficult for the pores of your skin to adequately remove the naturally occurring dead skin cells.  The result is a clogged pore in which bacteria, dead skin cells, and sebum combine into a mixture that leads to swelling, inflammation, infection, and skin tenderness.

After this a variety of different acne lesions start to form on your skin, whiteheads, blackheads and pimples being particularly common.This unfortunate mixture is collectively known as acne.

Living and dealing with acne

While there is no way to 100% get rid of acne problems, there are a number of things you can do to make living with it and dealing with it easier.  These include:

• Cleanse your skin – Use a gentle facial cleanser twice per day to help get rid of excess oils, dead skin cells, and bacteria.  Never rub or scrub your skin because this can cause more irritation and more acne.
• Apply anti-acne medication – A number of excellent medications are available both over the counter and by prescription.These medications offer substantial benefits to the user. Controlling the sebum production, helping to limit the amount of bacteria on the skin and thereby encouraging the removal of dead skin cells, being the main three.
• Moisturize your skin – Dry skin is not healthy and healthy skin is more resistant to acne, so moisturize your skin.The last thing you want to do is to add more oil to your skin, so a light in texture, oil-free moisturizer is ideal.

Understanding what causes acne makes it much easier to live with and deal with acne each day.You now have the correct information to deal with your acne problems, make sure you apply it!

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 13th, 2009 at 9:49 am and is filed under Acne Prevention. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.