Emotional scars can be as deep as your acne scars!

Everyone told me it was just my age and would clear up in about a year or so, but a year later it had gone from mild to really bad acne. My mum suffered with acne during her teen years too but she grew out of it quiet quickly, unlike mine which got worse and worse and continued into my twenties. 

I found having acne really hard to deal with and I tried so many different products from scrubs to face masks to face washes to try and control I the spread of it but nothing seemed to make it better, in fact they seemed to mostly make it even worse and more furious. My worst flare ups were when I was during my final year of sixth form the added stress of exams really made my skin worse. 

My whole face was full of acne especially on my cheeks, and it was extremely painful and I was aware of it all the time due to the pain. In desperation about the state of my skin I went to the doctor several times to see if they could give me anything to help. I was advised to you on a contraceptive pill to begin with but within months this pill really started to affect my mental health as it made me feel depressed and over emotional which wasn’t like me at all. 

I was then prescribed a pill called Lymecycline which did nothing and actually seemed to make my skin worse. The last treatment I was prescribe, before kind of giving up on doctor’s advice, was Accutane gel which I was warned was only a short-term solution. It helped a lot and cleared my skin, but my acne came back as soon as I stopped using it. It also dried out my skin a lot which ended up with it flaking and very sensitive, but it did get rid of the acne, albeit temporarily. However, when the acne came back it came back worse than before. 

Having acne has ruined my confidence massively, there’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think about my skin and what I can do to make it better and how I can get rid of my scarring and blackheads. Social media also had a lot of influence on how I felt about my skin as all you see is influencers and celebrities with clear and perfect looking skin every time you scroll. 

For a long time, my mental health suffered as I felt I looked too awful to be seen in public with bare skin and I would refuse to leave the house without any makeup and sometimes my acne was so bad even that wouldn’t cover it and so I’d just stay at home until it improved. Not only is social media a relatively negative influence on anyone who has problem skin, other people, especially kids, are also incredibly insensitive. At school I was mocked and bullied a lot about my skin and was called names and told to wash more often, that kind of thing. 

You try and shrug it off and as you get older you get it more into perspective but in truth, being bullied about your skin when you are younger, leaves you with emotional scars even into adulthood which can be as deep as your acne scars. 

Although on the one hand social media has got a lot to answer for when it comes to enforcing stereotypes of perfect skin, it is also a limitless source of information, support and honest reviews about things that can help with acne and it was through an Instagram review from someone with acne that I discovered Clarol products, for which I will always be eternally grateful. 

Obviously, I’ve seen more than my fair share of adverts and reviews about acne products and after you’ve tried a lot of them and spent so much money and had so little results you become very cynical about the whole thing. It feels like everything is a lie. However, there was something about Clarol products that was different to normal acne products you read about. They didn’t claim to give you clear skin quickly like so many do. 

They talked about the fact you needed to build back up your skin’s natural acne defences as so many people with acne have obliterated all their skin’s natural acne defences through endless rounds of anti-bacterial products and medications. This struck a real chord with me as my skin felt completely wrecked. It felt so sensitive and dry and fragile, like it had nothing left in it to fight back with anymore. The Clarol products (www.skinshop.co.uk or on www.amazon.co.uk) focused on building back up your skin’s levels of good skin bacteria to help it fend off the acne bacteria and also encouraged the production of sebum as they said it’s the skin’s best moisturiser and protector, but one of the Clarol products called Sebopure worked by keeping the sebum pure rather than trying to reduce it, which prevented blockages and contamination but without drying out skin. 

This made a huge difference to my skin as I don’t think I’d let my skin produce its natural levels of sebum for years as I was always scrubbing it away for fear that any oil on my skin would give me even more acne, which was probably why my skin felt so dry and sore. It felt like the products were focused on working with my skin on a longer-term rehabilitation programme rather than simply trying to blitz it in the short-term without any care about the damage they were doing in the long term like so many acne products do. Having said that I found the Clarol products started to have positive effects relatively quickly on my skin. It was hard to stop using all my facial washes and anti-bacterial products as they recommended I did. But I took the plunge and it took about a week for me to notice that my skin was getting slightly better but the longer I used the products the more my skin improved. 

It was incredible as I’ve never had results like that. It wasn’t just that my acne was starting to improve but more that the underlying quality of my skin felt so much better. It was less red, sensitive and dry and felt smoother, calmer and much more flexible instead of dry and sore. 

Slowly but surely the amount of live acne I had started to reduce and I was having less frequent break outs and when I did have one they felt less severe and angry. It was more isolated spots with larger areas of healthy skin in between, rather than the tightly packed clusters of eruptions with red angry skin underneath that I was having before. 

My entire skincare and make up regime has changed since using Clarol products. I’m using far less products and don’t use any anti-bacterial facial washes or scrubs now. I only use the Clarol gentle exfoliator and their good-bacteria building Silver Serum. I’m wearing about 50% less make up and during the day I don’t wear it at all usually. It now only put make up on for when I go out rather than as an everyday necessity. 

I’d say my skin has improved about 70% since using the Clarol programme for two months now. Even the acne scarring I had has improved. I still have the scars and probably always will, but they are less red and less protruding than they were. 

My skin doesn’t even look like my old skin anymore, it’s not just that it’s clearer but its softer and much more even. It feels to me like I look like a different person. 

My social life has improved drastically as a result of my skin becoming healthier. I feel much more comfortable in my own skin without having to cover it up all the time. 

I get excited about the thought of going out now rather than being wracked with anxiety. And I definitely smile a lot more now than I used to. Firstly, it’s not painful to smile now and secondly I don’t feel ashamed to smile any more. I used to worry about drawing too much attention to my skin if I smiled or laughed too much.”