What Causes Acne?

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What Are The Causes Of Acne?

Acne is an extremely common condition.  For most people, it is an unpleasant but inevitable part of their transition through adolescence and into adulthood.For the worst of reasons, suffering from acne is a memorable part of the experience of growing up for a lot of people.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, acne free skin, only enough sebum to help keep your skin healthy, by keeping it moisturized, is produced.After being produced by the glands it reaches the skin surface via the individual pores.By helping to remove dead skin cells and bacteria, sebum helps keep the skin clean and moist at the same time.This is nature’s way of removing the debris that inevitably gathers on your skin.

Whenever this natural process is disturbed, acne develops.A obvious time when this happens is during adolescence, when the body must deal appropriately with the increasing quantity of hormones and other substances it has started to produce.These changes in hormone levels during the learning process can cause many difficulties, the development of acne being one of them.

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.The ability of the pores on your skin to remove dead skin cells can also be adversly affected by these hormones.A clogged pore is the end result, an ideal environment for bacteria to flourish, leaving you with swelling, inflammation, infection, and skin tenderness.

What happens next is you begin to form various types of acne lesions on your skin; these can include whiteheads, blackheads, and pimples.Better know as acne, it is this combination of lesions that can cause so much difficulty for so many people.

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.Scrubbing your skin can lead to more acne because of the irritation. Gentle cleansing is always best.
• Apply anti-acne medication – A prescription from a doctor is not always required for these top quality medications.  These medications help to reduce the production of sebum, encourage the removal of dead skin cells, and cut down on the amount of bacteria on your skin.
• Moisturize your skin – Keeping your skin moist and therefore healthy, is the best way to keep acne at bay.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.

Living with acne day after day is easier if you know what you are dealing with.  When you have the right information at your fingertips you are well on your way to minimizing your acne problems!

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Under Acne Tags: causes of acne, what causes acne