I can still remember the feeling. Looking at my face from various angles in the mirror and thinking… I can’t go out like this. Dabbing my skin in layers and layers of foundation before dates. Choosing to skip a party because my face wasn’t in a good enough state. And then the skincare. Oh my god, the skincare. When you have acne, as I did throughout my 20s, it can be hard to escape the constant bombardment of “miracle cures”. Twelve-step skincare routines, retinols and retinoids, lights in different colours, extractions, major diet overhauls. I tried them all. But still, the acne stubbornly remained.
When you have acne, everyone tends to have an opinion, even if they’ve never suffered with it themselves. You have to balance your microbiome, or, you have to cut out sugar, or, this vitamin C serum will solve everything in two weeks. People treat acne as an almost moral conundrum, as if you’re just not trying hard enough, or haven’t done the appropriate research. But also, if you have acne, like I did, then you’ve probably done so much research that it’s actually made you a bit unhinged. You become a makeshift skincare scientist and a nutritionist on top of everything else, scrutinising products as though you’re the FDA. Words like “anti-keratinising” and “bacteriostatic” become a part of your lexicon. Your skincare regime becomes basically militaristic.
And the stress doesn’t end there. Online beauty trends – glass skin, dewy skin, dolphin skin – are hard to escape, and they nearly always just mean “very clear skin”. You won’t catch a skinfluencer or celeb pedalling a skin trend if they haven’t already got fairly clear skin to begin with. (If I started making videos about “dolphin skin” during a phase of active acne people would think I’d truly lost my mind.) All of this tends to make you feel like shit. And then you go nuclear on the products again, slathering benzoyl peroxides and niacinamides and azelaic acids all over your face like you’re preparing for some kind of apocalypse. And none of it gives you skin like Bella Hadid if you’re not genetically predisposed. So then you feel even worse. Rinse and repeat (literally).
Ultimately, I wish I’d known then what I know now, which is this: it’s important to stop stressing out. It can be hard, when the whole world is essentially telling you that acne is tantamount to failure, and that clear skin ought to be everyone’s life goal, but that’s their problem. Try to shut out the noise (as best you can). Your skin is not really any of their business. And aside from the obvious mental health implications, feeling stressed about your skin is not really useful. When it came to my own acne, I was only really able to tackle it properly once I calmed down and stopped caring so much. The journey towards clearer skin is a marathon, not a sprint, and hyperventilating never got anyone anywhere.
