How to Get Rid of Body Acne
Five Tips That Will Help You Get Rid of Body Acne for Good
How to get rid of body acne is the skin care question most experts overlook. We tend to think of acne in terms of blemishes on the face, but the fact is, the chest, back, and upper arms may also be involved.
The basic principles of getting rid of body acne, however, are the same as those for treating facial acne. Here are five tips on how to get rid of body acne that will help you get rid of body acne for good.
How to Get Rid of Body Acne, Tip #1
Wash regularly, paying special attention to your back. Acne anywhere on the body begins as a process of hyperkeratinization, or excessive skin cell growth. The skin on the back is thickest skin on the body and is particularly susceptible to quickly growing skin cells that can block pores. Keeping pores from clogging up with oil and acne bacteria anywhere on your body requires regular cleansing of your skin-but there is a right way and a wrong way to wash.
The best way to wash dirt, debris, and excess oil off your body is to begin by making a lather or foam. Apply the foam, lather, or body wash to acne-affected skin before you turn on the shower. Give the cleanser at least 30 seconds to loosen oil, dirt, dead skin, and other forms of debris before you rinse off. If expense is an issue, soap and water are usually fine. Use Ivory soap if you have oily skin and Dove soap if your skin is dry.
A hot shower feels good, but you should not expose your skin to hot water for more than 5 minutes at a time, and you should never use hot water to rinse your fact. That is because hot water dries out the skin, and microscopic flakes of dead, dry skin can block pores. Cold water is equally bad, because cold water constricts pores.
It’s also important to pat skin dry instead of rubbing skin dry. It can take a little practice to pat your back dry, but you don’t want to rub soap film, oils, and dead skin into pores. And it’s also important that you always use clean washcloths and towels.
How to Get Rid of Body Acne, Tip #2
Wear freshly laundered, loose-fitting clothing. The bacteria that cause acne can lodge in fabric and multiply in sweat. Wearing the same clothes day after day constantly reintroduces infection to the skin. Tight clothes can trap acne bacteria-or worse, staph or strep bacteria-and accumulate perspiration. It’s also important to launder bed linens at least once a week and preferably twice to keep acne bacteria off your skin. Be sure to avoid scented detergents and dryer sheets, since the fragrance can get into clothe, towels, and bed linens and dry and irritate the skin.
How to Get Rid of Body Acne, Tip #3
Keep any skin that is affected by acne moisturized. The old advice used to be that it helped to “dry out” acne. Nowadays drying out the skin is generally recognized as a bad idea. Dry skin anywhere on the body-but especially the back-is tight skin, and tight skin traps bacteria and oil inside pores. Even if you have naturally oily skin, you need to keep your skin moist.
Moisturizing does not always require buying and applying moisturizers. As a first step toward keeping your skin moist, drink 6 to 8 glasses a day, more if you perspire. Anytime you can pinch your skin anywhere on your body you are probably dehydrated and need to drink more water. It can also help to run a vaporizer or humidifier if you live in a dry or desert climate. The additional humidity in the air helps keep your skin flexible.
If you try these two simple measures and you still have dry skin, use moisturizer. If you have dry skin, almost any commercial moisturizer, as long as it does not contain fragrances or essential oil, if helpful. If you have oily skin, you can still need moisturizer, but you only need to apply moisturizer to areas of skin that are obviously dry. If you have dry skin, avoid moisturizers that add oil to the skin. These are products that contain glycerin, cholesterol, or triglycerides.
How to Get Rid of Body Acne, Tip #4
Use sunscreen or cover up. Before you go out in the sun, cover up or use sunscreen. Sunscreen and sun block not only prevent cancer, they stop inflammation that cause a serious outbreak of acne when your skin recovers from sunburn.
How to Get Rid of Body Acne, Tip #5
Always treat pimples as soon as you are aware of them. Treating body acne as soon as possible prevents the development of ugly pimples of disfiguring cysts. You can use benzoyl peroxide, but be careful about contact between benzoyl peroxide and clothing. Benzoyl peroxide can act as a bleach. This common over-the-counter acne remedy “gets the red out” and kills acne bacteria, but it can also dry out the skin and, ironically, cause more acne.
A better bet for most sufferers of body acne is tea tree oil. Tea tree oil creams do a better job of controlling inflammation and itch than benzoyl peroxide, and they also stop infections caused by staph and strep bacteria on the skin.
