The Stress Connection

As we have already showed, not surprisingly, stress has a starring role in the ongoing acne drama. “Ninety percent of my patients complain about what stress does to their skin. It has a huge impact, and it’s becoming a bigger problem every day,” says Katie Rodan, MD, a clinical professor of dermatology at Stanford University. Unfortunately, people complain more and more about stress’ effects, but they seem to ignore stress itself and its inner causes. Instead of doing something against these causes, people tend to go to the doctor’s for receiving prescription against all kind of diseases that stress triggers.

However, how can stress, that is the emotional anxiety caused by any number of factors in your life, show up on your face? The connection is purely chemical. When you become tense, your adrenal glands start working, flooding your bloodstream with the hormone cortisol.
Then cortisol triggers the sweat glands in your face to produce more oil. When your sebaceous glands go into high gear, there’s a higher probability that this excess oil will mix with dead skin cells and clog your pores, trapping bacteria inside.
The result? The result is no longer a mystery. It consists of more acne, primarily inflamed papules rather than blackheads or whiteheads.
But stress may go further…, beyond all expectations. After it triggered acne inflamed papules, stress can make people further pick on these papules, which will make acne even worse. The sufferers will then get even angrier and more irritated and will increase the already existing stress factors.
This way, people enter the vicious circle of stress and only a great inner power and their self consciousness will be able to save them.

Tip No. 3: No Alcohol!

Don’t drink too much, or you’ll get drunk! Well, when it is about acne, alcohol is also an enemy, although your skin can’t get drunk.
Alcohol is still used in some cosmetic products and this is not a very good thing for your skin and for your acne. Fortunately, one could read on the products’ labels whether they contain alcohol or not and thus one is able to avoid the bad products and buy the good ones.

So, if you use a toner, avoid products with high concentrations of isopropyl alcohol, or common rubbing alcohol. Because it represents a strong astringent, alcohol strips the top layer of your skin and causes your sebaceous glands to produce more oil. Thus your skin will become dry and will turn red; and possibly more blemishes will appear.
So, although drinking a cocktail is sometimes interesting, when it comes to your skin, alcohol should be always avoided!

Acne, a Hormonal Disease

The fact that hormones are related to acne is not longer mythology or grandparents’ idea; it’s pure reality!
In fact acne could be simply considered and called a hormonal disease. The hormones are the ones that are responsible for the maturation of the oil glands in our skin. That is why children don’t usually suffer from acne.
What you should know about hormones and their relation to acne is that there are several specific periods in everybody’s lives when the hormones can become unbalanced. Although, practically, the hormones may simply become unbalanced virtually at any time because of more or less simple causes, there are also these specific periods when hormones get unbalanced for sure.
So, puberty, pregnancy, menopause – are ones of these periods when acne could “attack” our bodies.
More specifically, it is the androgens, the male hormones that are present in both men and women, that are responsible for the apparition of acne on our faces and not only! These types of hormones are pressing the oil glands to produce a surplus of oil, which may be the instrumental in clogging hair follicles, where then the acne bacteria start to grow and develop the first acne pimples and blemishes.

However, the researches show that the hormonal cause for acne is seen mostly in women and also in teenage boys. In the women’s case acne is most likely to be related to acne because of the natural cycles the women go through, such as menstruation, pregnancy and menopause.
Sometimes doctors advice women to take birth control pills, which in small doses and joined by other topical remedies also, can be used in reducing blemishes by keeping the androgens steady. However, no one should try even considering using such type of treatment on her own without previously seeing a physician. We should not play hide and sick with hormones, because this would be a dangerous game that could lead to many terrible repercussions.
The hormones are in fact the base of the good functioning of our bodies! They have the role of regulating the functions of your body. Your sleep, growth, and many other things are being in fact dependent upon your hormones. However, everything that matters related to hormones is them to be in correct balance. If so, you won’t have acne and any other hormonal disorder.
The correct balance between the hormones of androgen and estrogen is being required for maintaining a healthy skin. But when the level of male hormones, such as androgen and testosterone, goes too high, acne could appear.

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