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In Order to Heal and Prevent Acne You Ought to Understand What Causes Acne

You need to know what causes acne in order to effectively prevent and treat outbreaks of acne. Outbreaks of acne affect nearly everyone. So, this knowledge is important. You can only prevent acne and care for future outbreaks properly after you fully understand what causes acne.

Your skin has a lot of pores, a number of which have hairs. Connecting to those pores are sebaceous glands that manufacture skin oil, or sebum. This oil helps keep your skin flexible. The pore is the channel through which the sebum reaches the surface to lubricate the skin.

What Does This Have to Do With Acne?

The simple explanation is that acne is a bacterial infection in a plugged pore. It generally manifests itself as a blackhead or perhaps a whitehead. Sometimes, the infection affects the surrounding skin causing it to become irritated and turn red.

This whole process starts several days before you can spot it. By the time you observe a pimple or zit, the bacteria has multiplied and induced the skin irritation and inflammation to grow large enough to become visible.

What Causes Acne?

Now, what causes that bacterial infection in a blocked up pore?

Acne occurs primarily in adolescents. The reason is that hormones, like testosterone, are beginning to be released. Testosterone is released in both young men and women. This will cause many organs to have to adjust to this new stimulus. The sebaceous glands just below the skin are one type of organ that needs time to adjust to these hormones.

The sebaceous glands manufacture sebum. This is the skin oil that lubricates the skin. It enters the pores to reach the surface of the skin. When testosterone is originally released, the sebaceous glands are powerless to cope with this stimulation. They become enlarged and begin producing extra sebum.

Further hormones are released when you are under stress. Maturing and testing your limits throughout the teenage years can often be a significant reason for stress. So, these additional hormones just increase the sebum production, making things even worse.

While all this appears pretty bad, time is on your side. After several years, usually about your early twenties, your outbreaks of acne stop. Your body, including the sebaceous glands, has gotten use to the new hormones. The sebaceous glands revert back to their natural size and sebum manufacture also returns to normal. Your acne goes away by itself.

However, before this happens these glands continue to produce excess sebum. The sebum flows to the surface of the skin. Dead skin cells on your skin become engulfed in this excess sebum. You skin is always renewing itself and dead skin cells on the surface are lose and may be rubbed off. So, after the sebum encounters these tiny dead skin cells a glob is formed. These globs can obstruct the pores.

Here is where the trouble starts. The glob of dead skin cells and sebum contain bacteria from the surface. It blocks off a pore. As more sebum is produced it starts to back up because the pore's exit to the surface is blocked. The bacteria love this warm, oily environment and begin multiplying. Bacteria begin infecting surrounding skin and inflammation results.

If there is an opening reaching the surface, this glob can oxidize and turn dark, resulting in a blackhead. If the plug is deeper within the pore, the pore can be completely closed off from the outside air. The contents remain light in color. This is now a whitehead which is often called a pimple or zit.

Now that you know what creates acne, you're able to handle it.
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