Why There’s No Way to Evade Acne

Imagine yourself standing in front of a mirror, having not slept for three days. Your face is covered with blemishes from a curse all known as acne, and it is definitely a pile of BS.

Every person goes through puberty as part of the aging and development process. One of the biggest drawbacks when you’re either in junior or senior high school is having a simple pimple before a school dance, whether it be regular, homecoming, or prom. Puberty is a rite of passage as you prepare for your fully grown, tax-paying, back-aching adult life when you suddenly wake up with a cyst on your forehead that has its own zip code!

Evolution can be a lie. We’ve spent millions of years climbing out of primordial muck, learning to walk upright, splitting the atom, and putting a rover on Mars, but your body still hasn’t figured out how to drain a microscopic pore without turning your face into a construction zone.

Let me talk about the timing. Acne is a tactical genius. It doesn’t show up when you’re sitting at home in your sweatpants watching reruns of your favorite TV show or something. They wait by lurking in the shadows of your dermis until the night before a job interview, a wedding, or a first date. Suddenly, your sebaceous glands decide to have a grand opening day for a brand new volcano right on the tip of your nose. You look like you’re cosplaying Rudolph with an attitude problem!

Then come the people called the Skin Care Disciples. They’ll ask you to try drinking more water, enough to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool this week. Your internal organs are practically snorkeling, and yet your chin still looks like a topographical map of the Andes. Don’t get me started on the products. You go to the pharmacy and there are five thousand tubes of miracle cream. One has benzoyl peroxide that bleaches your pillowcases at night and turns your skin into drywall the next day. The other has salicylic acid that does absolutely nothing except smell like a chemistry lab explosion. They never seem to remove the acne as they are riddled with false advertising and lies.

The ultimate kicker is the doctors telling you not to pop it or you’ll scar. Everyone does it anyway – you’re told to walk around with a white-headed ticking time bomb on your face and ignore it. It’s a physical impossibility, like you’re being told not to blink or breathe. That thing will stare at you in the mirror, mocking you, and challenging your authority as the ruler of your own body. Everyone has three layers of skin and apparently, everything is out to get me. Even if you’re forty years old, you still shouldn’t be buying concealer.

Back to the popping for a moment. This is almost always defied, and you spend days or even up to two weeks trying to squeeze it, hoping in vain that everything will come out. Eventually, it does happen, and the effects are always the same. Your pore explodes like a water balloon and pus is all over the mirror. Afterward, you have to reach out for a tissue because you’ll be bleeding from the site. The tissue remains there for hours because it’s still bleeding, made especially worse if you’re on blood-thinning medications. Don’t get me started on the pain this process comes with.

Sometimes, the acne can be so bad that you’ll end up being put on something called isotretinoin, otherwise known as Accutane. This stage is almost always feared by everyone because it is a big piece of torture employed by dermatologists. It’s awful, mean, and horribly bad. First of all, there are all these risks associated with the medication. This vitamin A derivative dramatically affects your skin as it tries to get rid of all the acne on your body. You end up bruising more easily and it will take longer for bleeding from popped pimples to stop. Second of all, it’s only available through a restricted program, thanks to serious side effects if taken by a pregnant woman, or if they become impregnated by a man while on the medication, and their child will look like something out of the remains of Chernobyl.

And that’s not the end of it. Your skin becomes more susceptible to sunburns on summer days, essentially making you a vampire for the duration of your treatment. It gets even better – thanks to serious risks involving liver damage and pancreatitis, you have to have bloodwork done every month, including before you start and after you finish treatment. After nearly nine months of treatment, dried and peeling lips, and getting stabbed in the arm, this torture all ends. In short, acne and the isotretinoin treatments are the worst things I’ve ever gone through in life. They can be anything but BS.