What exactly are we up against here?
Acne is a hereditary condition of your skin’s pores. An acneic pore sheds too many layers of skin in a day, about 5 layers. A healthy pore sheds about 1 layer of skin in a day. All these dead layers of skin then accumulate inside of your pore creating a pustule or papule (acne). This is known as retention hyperkeratosis.
So why doesn’t my sister, brother, mom, dad, whoever, have acne?
Well there has to be a trigger. Something happening internally or externally that is triggering the acne to appear on the skin’s surface.
Commonly these would be:
Imbalanced hormones
Stress
Poor gut health
Too much iodine in your diet
Poor clogging ingredients
Certain medications
When your pore starts accumulating these extra dead skin cells a microcomedone starts to form. You can’t see them but they’re lurking below the surface. In fact these start forming as far as 90 days before they ever show on your skin. This is why my programs are designed to be 3-4 months long, and why I won’t be having you spot treating your acne, rather we will be treating your entire face, back, shoulders, any acneic skin.
There’s different kinds of acne, that need to be treated different. This depends on if the pore becomes inflamed or not. This again is also inherited. If the pore doesn’t become inflamed a white head or bump will form. This is called a closed comedone, or non-inflamed acne. In inflamed acne as the dead skin cells and excess oil build up inside your pore, the bacteria inside will start to spill out of that pore into surrounding pores. This causes an infection which you know as a “pimple”.