Home Remedies for Acne

Acne is primarily caused by a nasty little bacterium called Propionibacterium acnes and a couple of oil-loving yeasts. The bad news: because you actually need these microorganisms for skin health, you can never eliminate them entirely. The good news: there are a number of home acne remedies that can be just as effective as most commercial remedies.

How Acne Starts

Most people don't have a problem with acne until those puberty hormones kick in. There's a good reason for that. Hormones and the growth spurt that comes with them tend to move your metabolism into high gear. A resulting increase of blood flow throughout the body makes everything start moving faster. Unfortunately, everything includes your skin cell life cycle and your oil glands.

As your skin sheds dead cells, they pile up on the surface, sort of floating around in your oiliest patches. They will drift on the oil tide into the follicles and glands of your skin, where they will get caught and settle. Picture a flowing river with a little eddy pool, for a good analogy. Leaves washed into the eddy don't go anywhere. Instead, they swirl in circles until they become waterlogged and settle to the bottom. And there, in pools, they rot and cause water to stagnate.

When your skin cells settle into your pores and follicles, they clog the already-overproducing oil glands. Things start to back up. Because your pores have no easy way to wash out the residue, bacteria collect to feed on it, and white blood cells collect to fight the bacteria, flooding the blocked pore. The result: an acne cyst forms.

Acne Home Remedy Solutions

The best treatments for acne, therefore, do the following:

1. Wash away overproduced oil and dead skin

2. Reduce any skin inflammation and prevent skin drying (which kills skin cells)

3. Kill overproduced bacteria before your immune system has a chance to react.

Remedies made at home work just as well at these things as that $20 bottle of acne ointment in your store.

The best way to remove oil and dead skin is plain old water. Use a washrag that is almost too warm for your face; the heat will open your pores and loosen the oil. Without scrubbing, wash your face - without soap - three times a day.

To kill bacteria, you can use a variety of things. Honey is a surprisingly good antibacterial; many home treatments start with an oatmeal-honey mask. To make this, just blend 1/8 cup of honey with 1/8 cup of water, add ¼ cup of ground oats, and gently pat all over your face. If it doesn't spread easily, add a little water until the consistency works for you. The idea is to have it spread easily, but not drip off your face or other treatment area. You can leave this mask on for 20 minutes and then rinse with tepid water, or leave it on overnight for a deeper treatment and rinse away the next morning.

A great facial wash is a crushed aspirin tablet - aspirin, not any kind of substitute - dissolved in about ¼ cup of water. The primary active ingredient in aspirin is acetylsalicylic acid, and the salicylic part is also a primary ingredient in most acne treatments that don't use benzoyl peroxide. Simply pat over your face with a cotton ball - do not rub or rinse away. This will kill the bacteria that are overproducing, and will encourage your skin to produce less oil.If you have an enterprising zit that, by itself, is trying to take over your face, the simplest remedy is white toothpaste - not tooth gel. Dab a little on the head of the zit and leave it there overnight; if you're a rough sleeper, you can put a band-aid over top. For daytime zit treatment, use a triple antibiotic ointment on just that spot. Never scrub or pick at the spot; if you treat it with washing, using the facial wash, and then just leaving it alone, it will heal by itself - and it is unlikely to leave a scar.

Once a week, you can steam your face. Do this by filling a basin with very hot (but not boiling) water. Sit in front with your face directly over the steam, a towel draped over your head. Do not do this for more than five minutes at a time. Immediately after removing your head, wash your face with plain water.

Things To Never Do With Acne

Never pick, squeeze, or molest an acne boil. The skin here is already inflamed; you want to calm the inflammation, not make it worse. Picking causes more white blood cells to rush to that site on your face - and this worsens the problem.

Never use antibacterial soaps or commercial treatments. Bacteria are funny things. No antibacterial kills all of them, and those that survive reproduce, creating baby bacteria that are also resistant. While your antibacterial works in the short term, in the long term you just create tougher bacteria. In addition, most antibacterial treatments dry your skin, which leads to more dead skin, more blocked pores, and more zits.

Never scrub. It inflames the skin, and may worsen blocked pores by pressing dead skin cells down into them.