Teenage Acne Treatments
Teenage acne is a common sign that you are transitioning into adulthood. Acne is a normal part of puberty and nearly every teenager experiences bouts with acne to one degree or another.
Those pimples on your face indicate that your body is changing. Specifically your body is starting to produce hormones like testosterone. And testosterone is having a significant effect on some specific parts of your body.
Why Teenage Acne?
What concerns teenagers where acne is concerned are the sebaceous glands. These are the glands that produce skin oil or sebum. The sebum is released by the sebaceous glands into the pores just below the skin. The sebum travels through the pores to the surface of your skin where it lubricates your skin, keeping your skin smooth.
For a while testosterone disturbs the sebaceous glands. The glands become enlarged in response to testosterone and start producing more sebum. The sebum flows onto the surface of your skin. But, there is more sebum than is necessary.
Now, let’s shift the scene to the surface of the skin. Your skin is always at work producing new skin cells. Old skin cells die off and can flake off or be rubbed off. Your skin is also exposed to contaminants in the air, including various types of bacteria.
And, now here comes a lot of sebum from a pore. The excess sebum encounters tiny dead skin cells and forms a clump that might block the opening of a pore. When the opening of a pore is blocked, new sebum being produced has nowhere to go. The pore begins to expand in order to hold the sebum. The bacteria love this nice warm environment and start to multiply.
After a few days, this blocked up pore, swelling with new sebum and infected with bacteria becomes large enough to see.
If the plug is near the surface, air can hit the plug and it can turn dark. This is a blackhead. If the plug is below the surface and the top of the pore closes up so no air gets to the plug, the plug remains light colored. This is a whitehead which is often called a pimple or zit. No matter what you call it, you’ve got acne.
Treating Teenage Acne
If you press too hard on a pimple or try to squeeze it, the bacteria may get into the sebaceous gland or an internal rupture of the pore could occur that would allow the infection to spread beyond the pore itself. This could result in a cyst or nodule which is more serious.
To treat or prevent teenage acne you should try to remove excess skin oil with a couple of cleansings a day with a product like Cetaphil Cleanser. You can apply a mild anti-bacterial gel like over-the-counter preparations of benzoyl peroxide
to help kill bacteria. You can also use a mild exfoliant like the over-the-counter preparations salicylic acid
to help remove dead skin cells. This triple-play will help clear up your face keep it blemish free.
The more knowledge you have the better prepared you will be to deal with and overcome teenage acne.
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