Patience is the key ingredient when it comes to your acne healing!
Have you heard of the saying, “Things get worse before they get better?” This applies to acne too. Healing takes time, patience, and self-constraint. We want to help acne warriors who have tried everything but haven’t reached healing yet. In this article, we’ll chat through the bad skincare habits you may struggle with, and how you can fix them.
Acne.org.za offers a Care Consultation to each of our new clients. We chat through your acne journey and help you figure out your acne triggers. During our consultation sessions, the dominant emotion is often impatience, and you feel stuck with the habits harming your skin. This cycle can be exhausting. You have tried everything, but nothing has worked. We see you, we hear you, and we understand your frustration. We want to help you become confident in your skin and find healing.
We are here to walk alongside you and share stories of how other people conquered their acne struggles and found healing. We will share more about their bad habits that caused breakouts and how they corrected them. It doesn’t matter what your skin colour is, your gender, or how old you are: acne shows no mercy to anyone. We must join together, share our stories of breakthroughs, and help each other.
Your acne journey does not need to be complicated or confusing. To start, all you need is to implement good skincare habits, focus on finding peace, and follow science-backed skin facts.
Before we talk about bad skincare habits, let’s look at the fundamentals of good skincare:
- Using the correct skin products that target acne.
- Drinking water throughout the day to flush out toxins.
- Not touching your face, neck, or chest. There are over 3200 different germs found on your hands, which can transfer to your skin to create acne.
Understanding your bad skincare habits:
Bad skincare habits include:
- Picking, scratching, or squeezing your skin.
- Not getting to know your skin and its unique needs.
- Mixing the wrong products. Some products you can mix, some you cannot. Being knowledgeable on this topic is key.
- Not using sunscreen daily or twice a day, depending on your unique skin requirements. Sun damage can create micro-wound that allow bacteria to enter, resulting in a weak skin barrier.
Let’s look at some bad skincare habits in more depth.
Bad Habit Number One: Using a variety of new products within two months of each other.
We often hear, “these products weren’t working, so I changed to a different brand.” The concern here is that you are not allowing products enough time to start working for your skin. Bacteria sit within the layers of your skin and take time to clear. When you keep changing your skincare products regularly, you aren’t giving your skin the time to respond and start the healing process.
Another thing we hear often is, “Why does my skin get so much worse before it gets better?” There is a simple answer. When you start cleansing your skin correctly, the underlying dirt and bacteria begin surfacing, resulting in more visible acne. So it seems like your skin is getting worse. But this is part of the cleansing and healing process. It can take up to 6 months to kill all bacteria in their skin! So it is important to stick it out with one product consistently to see lasting results. Our cleanser is pure and exfoliates, disinfects, and restores PH levels in your skin. Allowing more than two months for this to work is vital.
Bad Habit Number Two: Not using acne-targeted skincare.
Our products use science-based ingredients that have worked for centuries. Using acne-targeted products to cleanse debris will lead to healthier skin. We cannot control having pimples, but we can control how we address them and the mindset we choose when dealing with them.
Bad Habit Number Three: Using toothpaste on your pimples.
Toothpaste will harm your skin more than heal it. The ingredients found in toothpaste now are not what they used to be. Toothpaste has acid that benefits your teeth but hurts your skin. The acid and high PH balance will dry out your pimples and create age spots on your skin – marking your skin in months to come.
Remember that marks created on your skin today may only be visible in a year.
Taking this into consideration, you need patience when you’re dealing with your skin.
Ann Voskamp said it best, “Being in a hurry. Getting to the next thing without fully entering the thing in front of me. I cannot think of a single advantage I’ve ever gained from being in a hurry. But a thousand broken and missed things, tens of thousands, lie in the wake of all the rushing. Through all that haste I thought I was making up time. It turns out I was throwing it away.”
We are the generation of hurry. We want instant gratification and quick fixes. That may be okay for some situations, but it doesn’t work for others, like maintaining healthy skin. Hurry and impatience create an environment of angst, where healing requires peace and gentleness.
It has taken some of our clients between three to six months to stop bad habits and relearn what their skin needs. But once you know what your skin needs and stop touching or picking at your skin, you can start on a clean slate.
Do you know what your bad skincare habits are? If not, we would love to chat through your acne journey and discuss your next steps.
In the meantime, check in with yourself using the questions below. These will help you understand your current skin habits.
- How often do you drink water?
- How often do you apply sunscreen on your skin?
- Are you aware of the emotional toll acne takes?
- Do you swap and change your skincare products?
- How impatient are you?
Remember, we care about you and your journey! We have seen many success stories with our products and Care Consultations. Contact us on Facebook or Instagram to find out more about how we can help you find skin healing.
References:
Hand washing
Acne signs and symptoms
https://www.aad.org/public/diseases/acne/really-acne/symptoms
Best advice for acne patients? Patience
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/07/140717124728.htm
Understanding patience
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/patient
Definition of patience
