5 Biggest Acne Mistakes - Dermatologist Perspective

what's up everybody what's up dr maxfield dr shaw today what are we talking about today today we are talking about acne and you're like wait yeah we talked about acne before but we're talking about what not to do with acne yeah so acne is a big topic always things to say about acne this is the do not do list of acne five biggest mistakes that we see people making with acne and why their skin's not improving we're gonna break it down we're gonna tell you why here we go here we go [Music] all right you've got number one what is your number one tip for what not to do with acne okay so with acne one of the biggest mistakes i see people making is that they're not actually using an active ingredient that fights acne i know a lot of people have great skin care routine they send me their list of skincare products and you know it's a good skincare list you know they bought the cerave recommended cleanser they bought the cerave recommended moisturizer you know they're following good advice from good people but they actually don't have an active ingredient that fights acne and if you don't target the underlying cause of acne which we talked about in our prior video so if you guys haven't seen that we talk about what causes acne to form if you're not actually going after one of those causes you're really not going to see improvement in your acne and so the four ingredients i recommend at least having one of these in your skin care routine to fight acne if you really want to see progress with it it's going to be a retinoid vitamin a derivative something like different the laroche bose one that has adaptaline in it salicylic acid also known as beta hydroxy acid or bha azelaic acid which is a great one for pregnancy or benzoyl peroxide which is an antibacterial agent so if you find if you use one of these ingredients you're definitely going to see progress we have other products that we can give you at the dermatologist office that are a little bit stronger a little bit more effective but over the counter if you want to try treating your acne at home go for one of these first definitely the place to start uh the nice thing about salicylic acid is it concentrates within the oil glands it's lipophilic means what it just can dissolve in oil that was one of the things that makes that beta hydroxy acid unique right so it's really the only beta hydroxy acid that we use in skin care regularly the other acids that we're using are mostly alpha hydroxy acids as far as your glycolic acid lactic acid citric acid but those tend to be a little bit less effective for acne even though they will kind of break down comedones because they have that keratolytic or the ability to break down keratin but they're not going to be nearly as effective as salicylic acid because salicylic acids ability to penetrate into the hair follicle get into that sebaceous gunk break it down and then break down the pimple ultimately my number one and the number two overall is don't just spot treat your acne and what i mean by that is instead of using the products to prevent acne from coming up they're waiting until they get an acne bump and then they're using some of those active ingredients to try to get it to go away and while some of that may help you're definitely going to be disappointed if that's the way you're responding to acne you're not going to get that little bump you're not going to get that nodule to go away the next day or that afternoon or the same day if you're really desperate to get rid of it the most important role that a lot of these things have in addressing a lot of those causes those four causes that we talked about last week the oil production obstruction bacterial overgrowth and inflammation the best role that these things have is as a preventative it keeps the skin healthy it keeps it fresh keeps it from getting occluded plugged and inflamed yeah so one of the things i think about spot treating acne which i do think it's appropriate to give the extra push and we've talked about this uh with your acne spot treatment so if you're somebody who doesn't break out regularly you get one or two pimples are you gonna put a salicylic acid product into your routine that you know maybe a little bit drying for you because it's breaking down those oils or you're going to be somebody who ends up you know spot treating that spot or using just one active ingredient against acne so the way that i deal with with you know acne breakouts because i get you know one or two pimples every now and then is that i actually use a retinoid every night a tretinoin prescription uh which is amazing for anti-aging but it's also really good for acne and so i'm already basically trying to fight the cause of acne with my topical tretinoin but i still will every now and then get a pimple so what do i do i spot treat the pimple on top of using the tretinoin with something like a salicylic acid spot treatment a benzoyl peroxide spot treatment or even one of these acne patches that they sell where you put the acne dot on the spot and that gives it that sort of extra kick to try to help that pimple resolve maybe a little bit sooner try to get you going the right direction but i still think it's super important to treat the whole area with at least one thing and then if you want to get an extra push on your active pimples you can treat on top of that but just spot treating in general without doing anything else i don't think you're going to see much progress with that and you're going to be really frustrated because you'll say why am i still breaking out the number three acting mistake i see people making is using products that are just way too stripping to the skin something like an astringent and we'll show some pictures of that or something with alcohol a highly alcohol based toner that's going to be really stripping drying to the skin it's going to strip away your natural oils and i think we're inclined when you have oily skin especially when i was a teenager to try to use products that would remove a lot of that oil because i felt like i was oily all the time that my skin wasn't clean and so you naturally think that you need to remove oils from your skin and actually that causes breaks in your skin barrier which is going to increase inflammation and actually make your acne worse the other thing is that people with acne tend to have oily skin but you can have dry skin and acne too which is frustrating for people right so because it's hard to use these products that are stripping but you do need to adjust the skin care routine for people that do have sensitive skin and acne at the same time it's good it's good so fun fact about astringents yeah tell us about astringents because a lot of people feel that they need these toners or they need these alcohol-based products so how did this all start right so the question is uh this question is where did these come from why did why are astringents a part of the skincare routine where did this start so back in the day stringents were originally used to in between the cleansings and then actually between the moisturizing stage for us like the protect stage and they were an additional stripping agent to remove some of the soap scum and lye from lye based soaps and to remove some of the residue from like extremely hard water now most of us if not all of us probably don't use a lot of bar soaps and definitely not live based soaps on our face and the hardness of your water you know i'm not sure but that's not a problem for everybody so that original roll of astringents has kind of been phased out you don't really need it to remove the soap scum anymore i recognize that there are a lot of non-just purely stripping astringents out there some of them have have concrete and moisturizers some of them are trying to deliver more active ingredients to your skin but with that being said it seems kind of like the middle man you could cut out because you're already cleansing with some active ingredients like salicylic acid and then after that you're going to put on some active products active ingredients anyway along with your moisturizer so i think astringents are something that can be phased out i think that's why a lot of dermatologists really don't recommend them actively just because it seems like an unnecessary step right there have been advances in astringents essentially used to be highly stripping and now they have more astringents or even toners that have active ingredients in them like glycolic acid or salicylic acid and they tend to be a little bit more gentle and they do add something to your your skin care routine if used properly and so those those products are okay but there are a lot of products out there still where you see in the acne aisle specifically they tend to have a lot of alcohol in them we're on four so number four for me is being inconsistent when you're using these products this is something you really have to make a part of your life using them once a day twice a day whatever your schedule is you need to be using them every day over a period of months to see the net effect and to see the full effect of these medications you're going to see some benefit within a few days within a week to some of these things but really it takes consistent use over a period of months to know whether this is going to help or whether it's going to fail you or whether you've just kind of failed altogether because you didn't put it on so if you aren't using the products that you have you're not going to know whether this medication works for you and everything is going to underperform yeah consistency is super important just kind of like anything in life that's like exercising you know if you don't exercise consistently you know you can't expect to see uh gains look at me i have gains and you can't expect to see gains if you don't work out every day so or at least you know consistently three times a week something consistent but um you know if you're working out once a month you know you can't expect to maintain growth like i do as everyone knows i don't ever work out so these things but basically yeah you need to be consistent that's a good analogy actually so like for people who are trying to get into exercise they go hard for like a week and then they're done but guess what so it's the same thing with the skin you don't want to use 10 ingredients for a week and just blast your face and then kind of just let it all slide back same thing number five biggest acting mistake i see people making is that they're not washing their towels they're not washing their bed sheets they're not washing their pillowcases and these are things you're putting all over your face all over your skin after you've cleansed your face you know you're going back to the same uh pillow that may have all this kind of gunk that builds up over weeks at a time so i would say wash these things with a gentle what's the word detergent uh yeah i think so watch these things with a gentle detergent once a week and that's going to have additive benefits when you're treating your acne so i've even noticed personally you know i get really bad back acne and if i don't wash my sheets every week it tends to get worse i actually do see a noticeable difference if i'm treating my back acne and washing my sheets at the same time it tends to do the best that it can do and so um definitely something that i overlook as a teenager continue to sometimes not be consistent with but it's something that you can definitely do that won't cost you much you don't have to buy anything new you just need to wash your sheets a little bit more wash your towels a little bit more and that's just going to kind of get you closer to where you want to be yeah i mean and all the stuff in your hair even with some of the moisturizers that you're just putting on your face all that gets trapped into the pillowcase especially and you know we move when we sleep it's going to get rubbed all over your face and it's going to stay on and that's six to eight hours to nine to ten to twelve hours if you're an extremely lucky individual of just rubbing your face on some film that's been there for days and months it's true it's gross yeah don't be gross um that's it so five bigs if you avoid these unless you you know add treatments that are effective against acne you're gonna see a lot of progress if you still fail that come see one of us we'll help you out best we can thanks for tuning in please like comment subscribe more videos like this coming out each week thank you for your support and welcome to everybody who is new to our channel [Music] the reading rainbow that's the secret to good skin it's a secret knocking yourself in the face i actually put like cold um like not spoons not spoons but they have this thing on amazon where you kind of put on your eyes they kind of de-puff or whatever just the cooling cooling well temporary to de-puff you know and like since we shoot so early in the morning um it helps yeah it does okay look at my chapstick hold on yeah oh no dry lips it's a great number skin gains over muscle gains though all about that life skin life

Channel: Doctorly

Views: 428,622

Rating: 4.9764004 out of 5

Keywords: dermatologist, acne, skincare

Id: 2TZw7Yy0KmU

Length: 11min 42sec (702 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 17 2020