DIY Acne Experiment

Alright, so this next article is more of a confession and story about my personal experience with DIY acne solutions.  If interested in a short story of my yearlong journey to clear skin please read on.

So, first of all I have very low maintenance skin. I never knew this about myself until this past year and I am 24! As I mentioned before, I decided to start going all natural due to my recent research in chemicals that exist in most store bought products. I thought I would go the hippy rout and see if less is more really worked.  

·      For my cleanser: apple cider vinegar.

·      For my toner: one part water, one part apple cider vinegar.

·      For my moisturizer: pure aloe Vera gel.

·      For blemishes: I rubbed half a lemon or ice all over my face.

·      For masks: avocado or egg masks

I pretty much tried it all. This left me stinky, sticky, and zitty! I had never had worse skin in my entire life! The picture to the left was taken in June of 2015, this was the beginning. As you can see my chin area was most effected. It started out with one or two pimples then drastically grew: between my eyes, jawbone area, nose, temples, and upper lip area, as pictured below to the right. I realize it doesn't look too bad, but that's because I wasn't about to take a picture of myself without wear at least two pounds of make up! Even with all that cover up and bronzer, you can still see the red and inflamed areas. I started to wear a lot of eye make up to distract from the acne. These pictures were taken just days apart. I was embarrassed to go out, I hated walking past a mirror, every night I would go to bed thinking it was going to get better, and every morning I would wake up to worse skin than before. I even tried a few different face cleansers that contained jojoba oil, almond oil, and vitamin C oil, but nothing worked. 

You might be thinking, maybe I didn’t give it enough time. It takes at least three months for your skin to acclimate to product changes. Yes, yes I know. I gave it a full year! That’s right, I tried all this for close to a year. I was committed to finding a natural DIY skin program. Finally after many tearfilled nights, my loving boyfriend suggested that maybe I was going too natural and needed some modern soap products. Gentle, but still effective. I thought, well it wouldn’t hurt to give a basic wash a shot after all this.  So finally I switched to Cetaphil and Neutrogena products, making sure each product didn’t have a full list of ingredients I couldn’t’ pronounce. To my surprise, my skin cleared up in about three days. Thank goodness! I mentioned I have low maintenance skin, well what I meant by that is I only need cetephil facial soap twice a day and Neutrogena toner once a day. That’s it! I am proud to report I have blemish free skin as you can see in the picture below which was taken in May of 2016. Yes, almost one year after the first picture. It took some time and a lot of Maderma for my scars to heal, but nevertheless I did heal. Oh! Little secret, apply Madera on your face before bedtime as a moisturizer, it helps get rid of red marks and pimple scars...with patience. 

I want to make it clear that some women have the absolute best luck when it comes to DIY wash regimes and for that I am totally jelly of them. I would love to be able to use the most natural oils and washes on my skin. I believe the fewer chemicals we introduce to our bodies, both orally and topically, the better. However, for other women like myself, I need those harsh sounding cleaning agents like (butylene glycol and phenoxyethanol) to get the job done. I am happy to say that Cetaphil and most Neutrogena products use some of the mildest ingredients out there. So if you are in the market for DIY skin care by all means please give it a shot, but if it sounds like you have my type of skin, then you’ll have to pass on this chapter in your DIY book. I hope this doesn’t discourage anyone, but I feel I had to share my own personal experience. All I saw when looking at DIY acne solutions were positive reviews, not one person said that had a bad experience with going natural. Well, here I am folks!  Here is a more diverse review (I like to refrain from using the word negative, but let’s be honest this is a negative review of DIY face cleansers) SO not approved!