Cystic Acne: How It Happens, And How to Stop It
Cystic acne is one of the most annoying
skin conditions you can end up having to unexpectedly deal with. It’s like
regular acne, except it leaves really bad scars and doesn’t go away easily. In
fact, it often takes a lot of very careful treatment just to get it to stop
spreading, so understanding how to prevent it and lessen its effects is really
important if you’re hoping to treat it quickly, efficiently and reliably.
How Is Cystic Acne Caused?
In most cases, cystic acne has some
relation to your hormone levels, although there are various other possible
causes. It’s also often linked to the oil glands in your skin – these can
sometimes be triggered by hormonal changes, as well as big changes to your
diet. Sometimes it’s just a purely natural occurrence that doesn’t have
anything to do with changes you’ve made, and it’s not always possible to
pinpoint the cause directly.
You can try to figure out a possible cause
by changing what you eat: in some cases, cutting out daily for a while can
actually improve your complexion, since no more new cysts will develop.
However, since you can’t really do the same for your skin oil, you’ll need a
more active solution anyway.
What Not To Do
First things first, don’t just treat cystic
acne like normal acne – this will often make it even more irritated, speeding
up the spread and hurting you more than it heals the scars. This includes
behaviour like putting generic creams and moisturisers on your face, especially
if they’re thick, as well as using any kind of abrasive or dead-skin-clearing
wipes or pads. The only thing worse than having cystic acne is making it worse
by accident.
Make sure you get checked by a real
dermatologist, doctor or skincare professional if you suspect you have acne –
don’t assume it’s just clogged pores or dry skin. If it is cystic acne, you’ll want to make sure you’re using the right
treatments, and if it isn’t cystic
acne then you may end up using treatments that aren’t helping you solve
whatever the problem is.
Don’t randomly select a treatment, either:
take time to go through all of the common home remedies and treatments, rather
than just relying on something like a cortisone shot. They’re most expensive,
more likely to harm your skin in the short-term due to the way they heal the
acne, and are generally just a waste of time and money if something simpler
would do the same thing.
Getting Rid of Cystic Acne
The most important rule of having cysts is
to leave them alone. Unlike a pimple or zit, you can’t pop them or pick them to
get rid of them faster in exchange for a little bit of pain, and it’ll actually
make things much worse. Cysts directly damage the healthy skin tissue on your
body, so trying to pop them will just spread them even further and increase the
chance of them becoming scars. Keep in mind that some types of cystic acne
actually form underneath the skin, too – these become much more difficult to
treat directly.
If you’re dealing with below-the-skin
cysts, use treatments that are specially designed for them. Surface-level
treatments won’t penetrate your skin and do much to the cysts underneath, and
might irritate healthy skin in areas where there isn’t actually any surface
cysts. In the same way, if they’re all just on the surface, don’t use
treatments that go beneath the skin unless you really need to.
Some people
claim that you can use blue LED lights to kill bacteria beneath your skin, and
there are special products (including entire face masks) designed around this
concept. Since it’s a re-usable method, it’s quite a cheap way to future-proof
for coping with cystic acne breakouts
in the future. However, if that doesn’t work, you can just use anti-cyst
treatments or lymphatic drainage massages to stop the growth of the cysts and
balance out the level of liquid under your skin.
If problems still persist after you’ve
tried all reasonable home remedies, go and see a doctor. There’s always a
chance that the cystic acne can be a sign of something bigger, which may need
more in-depth treatment to fix.
