Pimples - What Really Causes Them?
Tomorrow, if someone tells you that you have zits because you never wash your face, don’t believe it. Pimples aren’t caused by dirt. In fact, scrubbing will make your acne look worse. Your acne is not your fault. The seeds of a bad complexion are sown in your genes. Take a good look at your mother and father. Did they have poor skin? Thank them. They probably passed their pimple prone skin to you.
What really causes zits? To find out, we have to go under our skin. The skin on your face, neck, shoulders and back is covered with countless tiny hair follicles, and containing sebaceous glands. Sebum, a thick, oily substance is produced by these glands. This sebum usually flows out of our pores to protect our hair and skin. If it gets stopped up and can’t leave the pores, we get blackheads and whiteheads. If the P.acnes bacteria that lives on the skin surface manages to infect these blackheads and whiteheads, we get full blown pimples.
You’re perhaps wondering what stops up the pores in the first place and traps the sebum inside? Improperly shedded skin cells from inside the hair follicle. Being dead skin cells is not the issue since we are constantly shedding dead skin cells every minute of the day. It’s the way that we shed these particular skin cells that’s the problem. We don’t usually notice them at all since they come off one a a time. But they don’t shed one at a time in acne sufferers, they “slough off” in sticky sheets instead. The pores at the top of the hair follicles get stopped up with these sticky masses of skin cells.The process is not well understood, but androgen hormones are responsible for this improper shedding. These hormones rise during puberty and gradually taper off for the rest of our lives. We can say that what causes pimples is, in the end, androgen hormones and how our bodies deal with androgen hormones.
Since hormone imbalance is the root cause of a bad complexion many people experience acne when their hormones are out of control during adolescence, pregnancy, menopause, and when they are under stress. So don’t worry about your dirty skin. If you have a poor complexion it’s not because you’re less clean than other people, blame your hormones. All acne treatments are not created equal. You have to take your hormones into account for any acne cure to be successful