Home Remedies for Acne

Acne is primarily caused by a nasty little bacterium called Propionibacterium acnes and a couple of oil-loving yeasts. The bad news: because you actually need these microorganisms for skin health, you can never eliminate them entirely. The good news: there are a number of home acne remedies that can be just as effective as most commercial remedies.

How Acne Starts

Most people don't have a problem with acne until those puberty hormones kick in. There's a good reason for that. Hormones and the growth spurt that comes with them tend to move your metabolism into high gear. A resulting increase of blood flow throughout the body makes everything start moving faster. Unfortunately, everything includes your skin cell life cycle and your oil glands.

As your skin sheds dead cells, they pile up on the surface, sort of floating around in your oiliest patches. They will drift on the oil tide into the follicles and glands of your skin, where they will get caught and settle. Picture a flowing river with a little eddy pool, for a good analogy. Leaves washed into the eddy don't go anywhere. Instead, they swirl in circles until they become waterlogged and settle to the bottom. And there, in pools, they rot and cause water to stagnate.

When your skin cells settle into your pores and follicles, they clog the already-overproducing oil glands. Things start to back up. Because your pores have no easy way to wash out the residue, bacteria collect to feed on it, and white blood cells collect to fight the bacteria, flooding the blocked pore. The result: an acne cyst forms.

Acne Home Remedy Solutions

The best treatments for acne, therefore, do the following:

1. Wash away overproduced oil and dead skin

2. Reduce any skin inflammation and prevent skin drying (which kills skin cells)

3. Kill overproduced bacteria before your immune system has a chance to react.

Remedies made at home work just as well at these things as that $20 bottle of acne ointment in your store.