Advice For Stopping Acne

Now there’s a word with four letters: acne. I was the Prince of Acne when I was a teenager, and for good reason. I was, to use a joke, the acne face. You name it, I had it—blackheads, whiteheads, you name it. And although the disdain of my peers, especially the girls, was one thing, it was quite another to be unable to get rid of the horrendous acne I had.

Acne-related beliefs and folklore didn’t help either. My relatives were adamant that eating a poor diet—or, more precisely, eating junk food—was the cause of acne. Yes, I will admit that I like my fair amount of junk food, just like any other team, but I wasn’t really confident that dining out was the root of my acne. Many of my friends ate out with me and even consumed the same junk food more frequently than I did, however they exhibited little to no acne. The popular wisdom had to be flawed in some way, right? I had witnessed the myth being disproved in front of my very eyes. Moreover, you’ve probably heard the one about how chocolate can lead to breakouts. And because I adored chocolate in all of its delicious forms, I would have thought it was cruel to give it up, even at the risk of continuing to suffer acne. But after doing my research and looking into relevant news and expert opinions, I quickly learned—much to my relief—that eating chocolate had nothing at all to do with acne.

My classmates and friends weren’t much assistance either. Most of them made amusingly sarcastic inferences that my acne-prone visage was a result of my too frequent masturbation. Hell, there was a time when I even believed it to be true. But I soon understood that this was just another myth. Actually, I’m beginning to learn, if only through the method of elimination. Because if my masturbating was related to my acne, was I to draw the conclusion that my male friends who had absolutely no acne did not masturbate? They were from another planet, which I would have taken as fact much sooner! So there you have it—another acne myth busted.

The idea that the buildup of dirt on my skin was what was clogging my pores was another myth that I actually buy into because it made perfect sense and even seemed scientific at the time. If that were the case, though, why didn’t my arms and legs, which were in contact with dirt more frequently, have acne all over them? In any event, I carefully scrubbed my face for days, weeks, and even months in a futile attempt to get rid of my acne while using a variety of soaps and anti-acne creams. I eventually succumbed to a fatalistic mindset and reasoned that the more anxious I became over my acne, the worse it would get. At that point, I stopped worrying about my acne-ridden face. And what’s this? A few short years later, when I gradually emerged from adolescence, the acne spontaneously vanished. Even while I still have a few visible scars from my acne prince days, most of the time you wouldn’t even know they were there!