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.

Have You Known This? Skin Care

After all those advices and threats…, we’ve decided to make you smile! At least a little bit.
We’ve reached some analyzes and charts showing some numbers that should both amaze you and make you smile.
So, have you known that one square inch of your skin is home to:

• 65 hairs
• 100 sebaceous glands
• 78 yards of nerves
• 650 sweat glands
• 19 yards of blood vessels
• 9,500,000 cells
• 1,300 nerve endings
• 20,000 sensory cells?

We bet you’ve known these all!
The next time you use the expression “I know it like the back of my hand,” consider this. And not only…
We should also inform you that our body’s largest organ, that is our skin, yes, makes up about 15% of our total weigh and covers 20 square feet!
Our skin protects us from all the exterior threats against which it is able to protect us. It allows us to feel pleasure or pain, coldness or warmness and it is continually working to “dress” us in a continually new skin.
However, this amazing organ isn’t powerful also against our deepest inner fears. We ourselves should cope of these ones!
So, despite the fact that our skin is like a mask that protects the other organs from the exterior threats, our skin is an integrated part of our body.
We should take great care about it and you should help it fight against all the things that might harm it.
Acne is only one of our skin’s old enemies. There are also others. But since this web site it is about acne, try to read everything we wrote here and to understand acne.
Our web site will provide you with all the information that we can possibly get about acne, but it will as well represent a point from where you can start fighting against acne and help your friend, the skin!
Be a winner!

Hormonal Acne: 2. Problematic Cycles

So, although it all started with puberty, for most of the young women acne remained somewhere in the past. They won’t be able to tell you when they stopped suffering from acne.
Thus, many women pass into adulthood without outgrowing their acne. Other may not develop this skin disease until their 20s and 30s, experiencing persistent breakouts a week before their period.
These big differences may vary from woman to woman and they show how different any woman is from another, how different each organism and each chemistry is from another!
During the course of a normal menstrual cycle (this is the case when the woman is not taking any kind of hormonal pills, such as birth control pills and others like that), estrogen levels peak at mid-cycle and then decline as the woman nears her period.

After ovulation, the woman’s ovaries begin to produce progesterone, which is another feminine hormone and which has the role to stimulate the sebaceous glands. So progesterone makes the sebaceous glands to produce more sebum and with the extra sebum comes also acne.
Thus, hormones are also responsible for acne in a percentage of pregnant women, as well, because the sebaceous glands go into high gear during the third trimester of the pregnancy, causing oily skin and frequent breakouts.
Some women might also experience acne after menopause, because of the estrogen levels’ beginning to taper off and testosterone becomes the dominant hormone within their bodies.

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